Editor’s Note: Since this blog post published, NetBox Labs has released the NetBox Discovery Quickstart Guide to get it up-and-running as quickly as possible.
Last month at AutoCon 2 we announced two new products, NetBox Discovery and NetBox Assurance. Today, only a few weeks later, we’re excited to announce the public preview of the new NetBox Discovery agent, which makes network and device discovery and ingestion into NetBox quick and easy. The NetBox Discovery agent is fully open source, and you can get started with it today.
With NetBox Discovery agents, getting started with NetBox is now much faster because you can identify and ingest existing network configurations and devices into NetBox as a first step in building out NetBox as your source of truth. NetBox Discovery addresses a variety of use cases, especially when coupled with NetBox Assurance, which is slated for private preview release in early 2025:
- Data center infrastructure management (DCIM): easily create and maintain an updated inventory of your networked devices
- Network audits: automate the performance of network audits for compliance and troubleshooting
- Detection of operational drift in your network: discover your network and device configurations to ensure they remain consistent with your source of truth in NetBox
- Compliance audits: support security and compliance requirements by streamlining detection of unauthorized or unplanned changes
- Incident prevention: identify and address deviations from your intent before they cause major disruptions
NetBox Discovery’s agent based architecture supports a “divide and conquer” approach to network and device discovery that is critical for today’s complex networks, which are often heavily segmented and distributed. The NetBox Discovery agent can be deployed and configured for discovery on a segment, site, or other basis, enabling successful and scalable discovery where monolithic solutions fall flat. And NetBox Discovery agents can be parallelized for faster discovery of large networks. Finally, of course, NetBox Discovery agents are tightly coupled with NetBox and the NetBox ecosystem: they ship data to Diode, the NetBox data ingestion engine, and will work natively with NetBox Assurance for ongoing identification and remediation of operational drift.
Simple and powerful network and device discovery
The NetBox Discovery agent is 100% open source, and is built atop the battle hardened Orb agent framework for distributed network and infrastructure observability. It is easily deployed as a lightweight single Docker container within any network, and the agent is configured with a simple YAML file making it easy to incorporate into your existing DevOps practices.
Getting started with the NetBox Discovery agent is as simple as running a single Docker command:
The NetBox Discovery agent supports two modes of discovery out of the box: network discovery and device discovery. Network discovery enables you to identify and ingest network configuration such as active IP addresses by probing the network directly, leveraging the massively popular and capable Nmap engine under the covers. And device discovery probes devices on the network directly to capture device details and configurations, powered by the well known NAPALM library with support for both core and community drivers. As a result, the NetBox Discovery agent has great coverage of most common network devices out of the box.
Our immediate mission with the NetBox Discovery agent is simple: make it easy to identify and ingest network and device information into NetBox. At least for now, the NetBox Discovery agent won’t be the right tool for unrelated use cases, like trying to discover the whole network (and more) by crawling, discovery of server inventory, SNMP data collection, network controller devices, or vulnerability detection. As always, we’ll continue to work well with the broader ecosystem of discovery tools in line with our Big Tent strategy, so if you’re solving a problem with NetBox for which NetBox Discovery isn’t the best fit, there are other great tools out there to consider.
The start of something big
As of today, the NetBox Discovery agent is available in public preview. In accordance with our product and feature lifecycle, this means you can get started with the agent today: repo and docs. The NetBox Discovery agent is not yet a GA product, and there will be rough edges. We want your feedback! Join us in Slack and raise questions or feedback in the #netbox channel, or email us your feedback at product@netboxlabs.com.
We have more big plans for NetBox Discovery. In 2025, we’ll deliver features available to NetBox Enterprise and NetBox Cloud customers for managing and orchestrating NetBox Discovery agents in distributed or segmented environments. And NetBox Discovery agents will work well out of the box with NetBox Assurance, enabling you to use ongoing discovery to identify and fix operational drift.
