Announcing our partnership with Grafana Labs to provide Enhanced Network and Datacenter Infrastructure Observability
NetBox data source, now available in the Grafana plugin catalog, brings authoritative infrastructure context to Grafana dashboards and alerts; NetBox Labs’ open source Orb telemetry platform gives Grafana Cloud users a modern source for network flow and packet telemetry.
If you run a network or a datacenter, you know the split-screen problem. Your telemetry lives in one place. The truth about your infrastructure and what it’s supposed to be lives somewhere else. And somewhere in between, an engineer is tabbing back and forth at 2 a.m. trying to figure out which device that interface belongs to.
For years, our community has closed that gap by hand. People have wired NetBox into Grafana with homegrown scripts and integrations because they needed the context, and nothing official existed. We’ve seen it at meetups, in GitHub issues, and in conversations with customers. The demand was never in question.
Today at NetBox Evolve, we’re making it official. NetBox Labs and Grafana Labs are partnering to bring authoritative infrastructure context into the place engineers already watch their infrastructure. NetBox knows what your infrastructure is supposed to be. Grafana is where you see what it’s actually doing. Bringing the two together means the context is just there, in every dashboard and every alert.
I’m grateful to the Grafana Labs team for working with us on this, and to every NetBox and Grafana user whose homegrown integrations showed us what to build.
Here’s what we’re announcing:
The problem: telemetry without context
The infrastructure underneath every digital business – networks, datacenters, and increasingly the massive facilities being built for AI – is producing more telemetry than ever. But that telemetry describes only what the infrastructure is doing. It says nothing about what the infrastructure is supposed to be: which device an interface belongs to, what site it lives in, what role it plays, who owns it, and whether it should even exist.
Operations teams bridge that gap manually today, switching between dashboards and inventory systems, maintaining brittle enrichment scripts, or simply guessing. As infrastructure scales, that gap becomes a dominant friction point in incidents, capacity decisions, and audits.
Why NetBox Labs and Grafana Labs
NetBox Labs and Grafana Labs are uniquely positioned to close this gap together. NetBox is the industry’s de facto system of record for network and datacenter infrastructure, documenting the intended state of infrastructure for tens of thousands of organizations. Grafana is where engineers already observe the operational state of that same infrastructure.
Both companies are open source at their core, and their communities overlap deeply: network and infrastructure teams often wire NetBox data into Grafana with homegrown integrations. This partnership replaces that homegrown effort with an official, supported path.
NetBox data source for Grafana
The NetBox data source for Grafana, built, maintained, and developed by NetBox Labs in collaboration with Grafana Labs, is available now in the Grafana plugin catalog. The free, open source (Apache-2.0) plugin makes NetBox a first-class data source inside Grafana, enabling teams to:
- Enrich telemetry with authoritative context. Join NetBox context (site, role, rack, tenant, owner, lifecycle status) onto the metrics, logs, and traces already flowing through Grafana, with no pipeline changes, no stale labels, and no added metric cardinality cost.
- Visualize infrastructure directly from NetBox. Build Grafana panels and dashboards from NetBox data itself, including inventory tables, topology node graphs, and geomaps of sites and circuits.
- Put context into alerts and annotations. Reference NetBox data in Grafana Alerting and surface NetBox change events as dashboard annotations, so responders know what changed, where, and who owns it.
The Grafana plugin works out of the box with open source NetBox and any version of Grafana – open source, enterprise, and Cloud. For NetBox Cloud customers, NetBox Labs will offer an enhanced, high-performance enrichment service that supports the same plugin at enterprise query volumes and scale.
Orb: open source network telemetry for Grafana Cloud
The new partnership also establishes Orb, NetBox Labs’ open source telemetry platform built on the pktvisor engine, as a modern, actively maintained source of network telemetry for Grafana Cloud users. Orb collects and analyzes network flow data (NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX), packet and deep packet inspection data, DNS analytics, and network quality measurements at the edge, and delivers OpenTelemetry-native metrics to Grafana Cloud.
Because Orb is fleet-managed and integrates with NetBox, monitoring configuration can be driven directly from documented intent. Teams monitor what they’ve documented, and see gaps between the two. Grafana Cloud users will have another way to ingest network telemetry and correlate the data across the rest of their infrastructure and applications.
Availability and getting started
The NetBox data source for open source Grafana, Grafana Enterprise, and Grafana Cloud is available now for free in the Grafana plugin catalog and on GitHub, and it works with open source NetBox, NetBox Cloud, and NetBox Enterprise. The enhanced enrichment service for NetBox Cloud will be available in coming months. Orb and pktvisor are open source and available on GitHub today, with documented integration paths into Grafana Cloud.
At NetBox Evolve? Join the Grafana Labs and NetBox Labs teams to learn more about our integration and other news at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
