The NetBox Labs team headed to Amsterdam for the latest Cisco Live event from February 9-14. As usual this event did not disappoint and the whole team had a blast. Read on to find out what we got up to….
The ‘A’ Team
Some of the NetBox Labs team travelled in from the UK, and Tom even left sunny southern California to brave the Amsterdam cold! This was our line up for the week:
- Tom Peelen – Sr. Technical Account Executive
- Rich Bibby – Technical Advocate
- Nat Morris – Director of Engineering
- Abs Rana – Account Executive
- Joel Stoddard-Turvey – DevOps Engineer
- Neil Miller – Solutions Engineer
- Chris Waite – Account Executive
Down at the Booth
Our booth, located in the World of Solutions was our base, and throughout the week we had a constant flow of visitors looking to talk all things NetBox with us! It was truly a fantastic experience being able to talk to so many folks running all kinds of networks that rely on NetBox as their Network Source of Truth (NSoT).
Two of the hottest topics at the booth were our new products NetBox Discovery and NetBox Assurance. NetBox Discovery makes it easy to discover operational state by gathering and ingesting information from your network into NetBox, if you want to give it a try our Quick Start Guide will have you up and running in minutes. NetBox Assurance (now in Private Preview) gives you control over operational drift by identifying deviations between your operational state and NetBox, and provides analytics to understand drift and plan for remediation, and ultimately take action.
Everyone uses NetBox!
One thing you quickly realize when you visit Cisco Live is how popular NetBox is – it was literally everywhere, and featured prominently in some of the most popular sessions throughout the week. Here are just a few of our favourites…
NetBox Labs collaborated with the team from Red Hat to run a daily Network Automation and Sources of Truth workshop in the DevNet Zone. This proved to be incredibly popular with delegates keen to see how NetBox and Ansible Automation Platform integrate seamlessly to enable Event Drive NetDevOps workflows. If you missed out on this session you can also see it in action in a recent webinar we hosted with Red Hat.
During the week Patrick Mosimann and Luca Gabler hosted two breakout sessions and a workshop called Automate Network Operation Tasks with NetDevOps and Source of Truth. Delegates attending these popular sessions learned about using NetDevOps practices with NetBox as a flexible Source of Truth (SoT) framework and how it can change the way you approach network operations.
Anna Wojcik (Software Engineer Infrastructure, Cisco) hosted Stop the Chaos, Organize your Network with NSO and NetBox, which focussed on use cases of NSO and NetBox working together, with examples of the integrations and demos, focused on NSO and the NetBox API.
Any session run by the the inimitable Palmer Sample (Developer Advocate, Cisco Training Bootcamps) is always a huge hit and Network Testing with pyATS – Level III: Advanced Network Testing Using Sources of Truth was no exception! This session demonstrated the full potential of pyATS by generating a dynamic testbed from NetBox, and then using device and interface data from NetBox as the desired state to be tested.
More Great Sessions
Chris Beye (Systems Architect, Cisco) and Joerg Schultz (Partner Systems Architect, Cisco) ran an amazing lab session called Closed-Loop Automation using CI/CD Pipelines with the Power of AI. This session showcased AI-driven solutions to proactively identify, diagnose, and resolve network issues, enhancing operational efficiency and reducing downtime, of course using NetBox as the Source of Truth for the network data.
I had the pleasure of delivering session Closing the Loop: Automated Discovery and Assurance for Cisco Networks with NetBox in the Cisco U. Theater. The talk demonstrated a full end-to-end workflow where NetBox Discovery automates device discovery and NetBox Assurance provides real-time insights into the discovered data, driving automated response actions to address network drift.
Kareem Iskander (Head of Technical Advocacy, Cisco) and Akhila Pamukuntla (Software Engineer, Cisco) delivered a great DevNet session called Enhancing Network Automation with Event-Driven Architecture. This session explored the key motivations behind adopting event-driven architectures for network automation, and delved into the inner workings of NetBox Events, as well as Splunk, highlighting Cisco Meraki Dashboard and NetBox Events in action.
The Cisco Live Network and NetBox
NetBox is critical to the smooth running of the Cisco Live network (of course!), and on Thursday Joe Clarke (Distinguished Engineer, Cisco) hosted a breakout session called Cisco Live: Brought To You By Cisco NSO and Cisco Modeling Labs. This fascinating session took a deep-dive into the solution used to design, build, and test the data centre network at Cisco Live. The infrastructure is driven by Cisco NSO service definitions, linked to NetBox, and modelled ahead of time using Cisco Modelling Labs. Amazing!
If you weren’t able to visit Cisco Live in person then be sure to check out the Cisco Live On-Demand Library where you can find all the sessions featuring NetBox from Amsterdam and others from previous Cisco Live events.
NetBox Heroes
On Monday evening, the amazing Ski Hut at StrandZuid was the venue for a NetBox Labs Social hour where the team got to chat with some of our lovely customers and partners over well earned drinks and some delicious food. This was the perfect way to for everyone to relax after a busy first day on the booth!
Wrapping Up
Wow! What a week. The team at NetBox Labs had an awesome time, and it was such a pleasure for us all to engage with so many prospects, customers and partners during the event, as well as team up with some true NetBox Heroes along the way. We are already looking forward to the next Cisco Live in San Diego, and we hope to see you there.
Missed the chance to meet up with our team? Reach out any time.
