It’s been a couple months since we first introduced the concepts behind Diode. The structure and referential integrity of the NetBox data model is a huge part of what makes it so powerful, resulting in fewer network issues and creating the predictability needed for automation. However, because of that structure, ingesting data about your network and infrastructure from other sources into NetBox can be a laborious process, and data ingestion automations need to be built with consideration for order of operations, round trips to create the appropriate relationships between objects, and other complexities.
Diode, our new data ingestion service for NetBox, addresses a key need in the NetBox ecosystem: making it easier to get data into NetBox’s comprehensive and consistent network data model. Announced just a few months ago, it clobbers the complexity and takes care of the heavy lifting of getting data into NetBox by resolving dependencies, transforming data, creating objects and relationships as needed, and more.
Recapping Diode’s private preview program
More recently, we kicked off Diode’s private preview program to gather hands-on feedback from the NetBox community. We’re very thankful for the flurry of engagement and feedback from our private preview participants over the last few weeks. Participants in the Diode private preview exercised the Diode SDK and core service, ingested data from spreadsheets and YAML and other sources, and experimented with the recently released Diode Agent for device discovery. One participant even built and open sourced an SNMP collector for Diode (kudos, Renato)! We’re thankful for all the help and feedback from our private preview participants. It has shaped our recent Diode efforts and has resulted in a number of upcoming areas of focus, which we touch on below.
Get Started With Diode Today
One thing is crystal clear from Diode’s private preview: the functionality Diode provides is very valuable as-is, even while there are a lot of ideas for enhancements still to come. For this reason, we are making Diode available today for public preview by the community, while we continue to work toward general availability later this year.
As of today, Diode’s source code is available to the community and you can get started testing Diode out for your own use cases. Here’s how to get going:
- Diode is available on Github
- Follow our Get Started with Diode Guide
- Check out the Diode docs page
- We’ve created a channel for Diode discussions on the NetDev Slack – join #diode
- Found a bug or have a feature request? We’d love you to participate via the GitHub project – in general, the NetBox contribution guidelines apply to Diode as well, so please give those a glance first
What’s next for Diode
There’s still a lot of work to be done before we move Diode into GA status later this year. Thanks to the feedback of our private preview participants, we’ll be working on a number of enhancements next:
- Better visibility into the changes Diode is making to data in NetBox, and especially better visibility into data Diode is unable to ingest and the reasons why
- Expanding the set of core NetBox data models supported by Diode’s ingestion engine
- Expanding and improving the documentation for Diode
- Optimizing Diode’s performance for very large scale data sets
The list will no doubt grow during Diode’s public preview as more of the NetBox community begin to use the software, and we’re excited to hear your feedback on how we can expand and improve Diode’s functionality.
We’ll continue to share significant Diode updates in new blog posts as well, and Diode will be available in all editions of NetBox – including NetBox Enterprise and NetBox Cloud – when it GAs later this year.