NetBox Custom Objects Enters Public Preview

For years now NetBox users have enjoyed customization options including Tags, Custom Fields and Plugins, and hundreds of organizations have used these capabilities to successfully operate dynamic and complex infrastructure at great scale.

Building on this success, many in the NetBox community have sought ways to extend the NetBox data model, seeking approaches that combine the simplicity of Tags and Custom Fields, with the power of Plugins, without requiring users to write and maintain Python code.

NetBox Custom Objects provides users with a no-code ability to extend the NetBox data model, and we’re pleased to announce that Custom Objects has now entered Public Preview. 

The journey so far

At NetBox Labs we are fortunate to get to work with a huge community of NetBox users when developing new features and NetBox Custom Objects has been an incredible showcase for that collaboration.

From the moment we announced the Tech Preview in February (note: the feature was called Service Mappings at the time) we had community members sharing their interest and expertise. The Custom Objects Private Preview, announced in April, attracted the largest response in NetBox Labs history. I’d like to say a huge thank you to all those who joined the Private Preview and shared their feedback, and to those who we couldn’t fit in the program, thanks for your patience!

Get involved

At NetBox Labs our Public Preview product lifecycle stage is the final stage before GA and a great way for all community members to try our upcoming products and features, and provide their feedback. The Public Preview phase can be thought of as a beta release: there is much still to be done, but Custom Objects is now at the point where it is stable and useful enough to widen the feedback to all interested parties.

If you’d like to test out NetBox Custom Objects, please keep the following useful pointers in mind:

• For installation and usage instructions, please see the README (you can also review the webinar we did in May)
• We’ve created a NetBox Custom Objects quickstart guide to help you get going quickly
• For reporting feedback or ideas for future improvements
  • First check the existing backlog of issues and contribute to existing conversations where possible
  • For bugs or feature requests that don’t already have an open issue, please use the appropriate issue template and provide as much information as possible
  • If you’d like to discuss an idea, or double check your thinking on something please contribute to existing discussions, or start a new one
• If you’d like to chat with other users about NetBox Custom Objects, please join the #netbox channel in the NetDev Slack

What’s next?

We’re taking our time with the Custom Objects public preview, and expect to move to General Availability around the NetBox 4.4 release in early September. This is not only because we want to give the NetBox community the chance to provide feedback, but also because we still have a whole bunch of features that we’re quickly adding, both to complete existing functionality and also around exciting new ideas like making custom objects, and collections of custom objects, easier to share and collaborate on for the whole community.

We hope you have fun experimenting with this powerful new feature, and we look forward to hearing your feedback.