Introducing the NetBox Data Exchange

The world’s largest curated dataset of infrastructure metadata is a window into how fast the physical world underneath your network is changing.

You can’t operate infrastructure you don’t understand. And right now, most teams don’t fully understand the hardware in their own racks, not because they lack the talent, but because the data they need is scattered across vendor PDFs, EOL bulletins, support portals, and one person’s spreadsheet.

That gap is getting more expensive every year, because infrastructure is changing faster than ever. Product cycles are compressing, cooling architectures are being reinvented, and the operating systems running on network hardware are fragmenting across vendors. Meanwhile, operators are under more pressure than ever to move quickly across every phase of the infrastructure lifecycle, from design and procurement through deployment, operations, and refresh.

Today we’re closing that gap. I’m excited to announce the NetBox Data Exchange (NDX): the world’s largest curated dataset of infrastructure component metadata, delivered as a public reference for the entire infrastructure community and directly into NetBox for our customers.

On June 11, NetBox Labs announced its infrastructure intelligence platform, a unified system that lets teams and AI agents model, see, act on, and govern infrastructure with confidence. Coinciding with NetBox’s 10th anniversary, the announcement includes NDX, NetBox Asset Lifecycle, NetBox Labs Platform MCP Server & Agent Skills, and NetBox Validation. Read the main blog post on this news for all the details.

Infrastructure intelligence starts with the data

At NetBox Labs, we deliver infrastructure intelligence – turning the sprawl of physical and virtual infrastructure into a trusted, queryable, actionable system of record. The NetBox Labs Infrastructure Intelligence Platform is how we do that: unifying the way you model, see, act upon, and govern your infrastructure around a single source of truth.

Intelligence starts with data you can trust. As I wrote recently, you cannot automate – much less secure, or plan, or modernize – what you don’t understand. NDX is a direct expression of that idea: rich, authoritative metadata about the components that make up your infrastructure, available the moment you need it.

What NetBox Data Exchange is

NDX is a continuously-curated catalog of infrastructure component metadata covering more than 16,000 hardware models across hundreds of manufacturers – switches, routers, firewalls, servers, UPSes, PDUs, cooling units, and more.

For each device, NDX goes well beyond the basics of interfaces and rack units, incorporating deep enrichment metadata:

• Lifecycle data – general availability, end-of-sale, end-of-support, and end-of-life dates
• Thermal and power data – TDP, airflow, cooling type, typical and maximum power draw
• Platform identification – network operating system and family, drivers, management interfaces
• Observability metadata – SNMP OIDs, gNMI paths, NETCONF models, Redfish sensors, and Modbus register maps that tell you not just what to monitor, but how

Every data point is traced to its source document and retrieval date, and carries a confidence score, so you always know where a value came from and how much to trust it. Behind today’s catalog sit nearly 200,000 individually-sourced data points drawn from more than 12,000 vendor documents, and the dataset grows every week.

NDX is free to browse for everyone at the NDX website, where you can look up any device, see its basic characteristics and what data NDX has available, and download device-type definitions. For NetBox Cloud and NetBox Enterprise customers, the full enrichment dataset flows directly into NetBox through the NDX plugin, where it powers real workflows: selective, incremental import in seconds instead of hours, plus lifecycle, thermal, power, and observability data on your actual deployed inventory.

A window into how infrastructure is changing

As we’ve curated metadata at this scale, patterns have emerged that no single network or infrastructure team could see on its own. A few that jumped out as we built NDX:

The end-of-support cliff is real, and traditionally hard for operators to characterize. Across the products NDX tracks with known support dates, roughly 700 lose vendor support within the next two years, and more than 1,000 within three. A single major vendor can account for hundreds of these in one wave. The hardware is still humming in the rack while the clock is ticking on the support contract behind it. Do you know which devices in your network are about to go dark on support?

Liquid cooling has crossed the tipping point. In 2018, fewer than 1 in 1,000 new products in our dataset shipped with liquid or hybrid cooling. By 2025 that’s climbed to roughly 1 in 20, and is continuing to accelerate sharply as AI and high-density compute reshape the data center. The thermal assumptions baked into your facilities planning a few years ago are already out of date.

Network operating systems are fragmenting fast. NDX now tracks more than 350 distinct network operating systems. SONiC alone shows up on hardware from eight different vendors in our data, and Linux-based NOS families span more than a dozen. Disaggregation isn’t a slide in a keynote anymore – the clean one-vendor-one-OS world is gone.

These are exactly the kinds of questions that operators need to manage their infrastructure intelligently, and with NDX feeding the NetBox Labs platform, they can.

Fueling the lifecycle, end to end

Rich component metadata is most powerful when it’s married to your actual infrastructure and put to work across the lifecycle:

• Design and procurement – bring validated specs, power, and thermal data in at the very start, before anything is ordered or racked
• Deployment – import accurate device types in seconds, not hours
• Operations – auto-inform monitoring with per-platform observability metadata
• Lifecycle management – cross-reference your deployed fleet against real end-of-support dates to get ahead of the cliff

The first and last of those connect directly to another step we took recently – last week we announced Asset Lifecycle, which brings procurement into the infrastructure system of record. NDX supplies the lifecycle and specification data and Asset Lifecycle puts it to work across BOMs, purchase orders, and refresh planning. Together, NDX and Asset Lifecycle are part of the same arc, along with our upcoming NetBox Designs and NetBox Analytics products: making every phase of the infrastructure lifecycle data-driven, not spreadsheet-driven.

Standing on the shoulders of the community

NDX would not exist without the work of the community maintainers of the widely used NetBox Device Type Library (DTL). For years, contributors around the world have built and curated standardized, machine-readable device-type definitions, proving that this kind of shared infrastructure data is both possible and immensely valuable.

The DTL was an inspiration for NDX, and it remains one of NDX’s data sources: community-contributed device types are included in full, clearly attributed, with every entry linking back to its origin. Where our curation surfaces fixes or improvements that belong upstream, we will contribute them back to the DTL. To everyone who has contributed to the Device Type Library over the years: thank you. NDX is built to amplify your work and carry it to a far larger audience.

Get started

NDX is live today. Browse the full catalog at netboxlabs.com/ndx. NDX is available in NetBox Cloud today, with NetBox Enterprise support coming soon – customers can contact our support team to enable NDX in your NetBox instance and bring this data directly into your system of record.

Infrastructure is evolving faster than any team can track by hand. NDX is one of the many ways NetBox Labs helps you keep up, with confidence in your data, at every stage of the lifecycle. It’s infrastructure intelligence, and it starts with the data.