NetBox Integration with Cisco ACI: Seeking Design Partners
Great news for NetBox users! We’re thrilled to announce our upcoming integration with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) – and we’re looking for design partners to help shape this integration.
Cisco ACI is the leading software-defined networking solution for data center environments, managing complex fabric architectures across enterprise deployments. Organizations using NetBox have consistently requested integration with their ACI-managed infrastructure. This new integration enables teams to maintain complete visibility of their data center fabric within NetBox, eliminating manual synchronization and ensuring consistency across systems.
The Challenge of Managing Data Center Infrastructure Documentation
Typically, NetBox serves as the authoritative source for network infrastructure documentation, while ACI manages fabric operations and policy orchestration. Without integration, teams manually duplicate fabric inventory data, creating inconsistencies and operational inefficiencies that impact automation efforts and visibility.
Data center infrastructure, despite representing a critical portion of enterprise networks, is often the most challenging to document accurately. ACI fabrics can span multiple geographically dispersed locations, with a rich policy model, diverse interface relationships, segmentation capabilities and detailed VLAN and VRF assignments that can be seamlessly incorporated into broader network documentation
A Focused Approach to Fabric Infrastructure Integration
Like our recently announced integrations with Cisco Catalyst Center and Cisco Meraki, the ACI integration embraces a shared authority model. In today’s complex IT ecosystems, data center infrastructure management requires specialized tools working in harmony with broader network documentation systems.
The goal of NetBox ACI integration is effective modeling of the ACI fabric infrastructure itself, rather than complete policy orchestration. The integration is designed to provide comprehensive synchronization of ACI-managed fabric infrastructure into NetBox, including:
- Device Inventory: Complete synchronization of fabric devices including spine and leaf switches, with node IDs, pod assignments, models, and operational status
- Interface Modeling: Comprehensive representation of physical Ethernet ports and key Layer 3 interfaces essential for fabric connectivity
- Network Context: Mapping of VRFs, prefixes, and IP addresses associated with interfaces, with optional tenant relationship modeling
- VLAN Integration: Synchronization of Layer 2 segments including VLANs and bridge domain-backed VLANs where applicable
- Flexible Tenant Handling: Configurable tenant mapping that allows administrators to choose between tracking ACI tenant information via custom fields or mapping to NetBox tenant objects based on their organizational structure
This integration ensures that NetBox remains the central source of truth for network infrastructure documentation while ACI continues to excel at policy orchestration and fabric management. The result is transformative: ACI fabric topology integrates with physical rack layouts and cable connections, VRF and VLAN assignments align with your global IPAM strategy, and your data center fabric becomes a fully contextualized part of your complete network topology.
Call for Design Partners
This is where you come in.
The NetBox ACI integration has been evolving within our NetBox Labs Experimental stage, and we’re now ready to work closely with select organizations to refine and validate the integration before broader availability. As we prepare this integration for private and public previews, we’re seeking your feedback to help shape its direction and ensure it meets real-world needs.
If you operate NetBox alongside Cisco ACI and want to influence the future of this integration, we’d love to have you as a design partner. Design partners will get exclusive access to product previews, influence our roadmap, and help shape the future of this exciting new integration.
Join Us
If you’re ready to bring powerful clarity to your data center and network infrastructure — we’d love to hear from you. Sign up below to become a NetBox Cisco ACI design partner today. Together, we’ll ensure your network is not only documented, but seamlessly aligned with your fabric operations.
