New partnership brings additional discovery, assurance and reconciliation options to NetBox Cloud, NetBox Enterprise and NetBox OSS users through the addition of NetBox Sync capabilities in SuzieQ Enterprise 2.8
Today we’re thrilled to announce our official partnership with Stardust Systems, long standing NetBox ecosystem champions, and creators of the well-known and widely adopted network observability tool SuzieQ. With today’s announcement NetBox Labs and Stardust Systems customers, along with the NetBox open source community, will for the first time be able to seamlessly populate NetBox with network information found via SuzieQ’s multi-vendor network observability tool including:
- Devices, Hostnames, Device Types, Serial Numbers
- Platforms, Platform Versions
- Interfaces, MTUs
- IPs, Prefixes, VRFs
- And much more!
Deepening the NetBox and SuzieQ story
The new NetBox Sync functionality in SuzieQ Enterprise 2.8 extends an already diverse choice of tooling for discovering and reconciling networks into NetBox. In January we announced partnerships with Forward Networks, IPFabric and Slurp’it, and in keeping with our big-tent philosophy, this latest addition further widens the options for networking teams when deciding which tools to use to manage and scale their networks. The integration between all editions of NetBox and SuzieQ Enterprise, now updated to be bidirectional, opens up opportunities for teams in other areas outside of discovery and reconciliation.
As networks scale, networking teams can become overburdened by alerting from their monitoring. Enriching alerts with intended state from NetBox and observed state data from SuzieQ can cut the time engineers spend both figuring out what’s wrong and applying a fix. To avoid issues occurring in the first place, many networking teams are looking to more robust change validation when updating the network, as evidenced by the findings in the recent EMA Research study on enterprise network automation sponsored by NetBox Labs. NetBox and SuzieQ make a powerful combination in both pre- and post-change testing to make sure that updates to the network are correctly applied and function as intended.
“Netbox is one of the most important parts of the network automation tool chain. We’re thrilled to have worked closely with the Netbox Labs team to ensure users can easily onboard existing network state into Netbox”, says Dinesh Dutt, CEO of Stardust Systems, the company behind SuzieQ. “SuzieQ can pull information from devices as frequently as every 90 seconds, allowing network teams to catch drift between observed state and expected state almost immediately”.
Longtime allies
Way back in 2022, the team at Stardust Systems knew that integrating with NetBox opened up key workflows for networking teams looking to automate their networks and their 0.16.0 release saw the introduction of NetBox Dynamic Inventory support. Not unlike the NetBox Dynamic Inventory support available for Ansible and Nornir, this functionality has enabled teams to choose best of breed tooling for network automation, without needing to replicate functionality or create and maintain unnecessary glue code. Maintaining an up-to-date network inventory in NetBox’s rich data model and using that single-pane view to inform the observability functionality provided by SuzieQ made perfect sense, and resonated with both tools’ communities.
“SuzieQ’s multi-vendor and open source first approach meshes perfectly with our philosophy at NetBox Labs”, says Kris Beevers, CEO at NetBox Labs. “Combining NetBox’s market leading data model with SuzieQ’s rich observability capabilities is a perfect combination for busy networking teams, who in order to keep up with business demands need to know both what their networks should be doing, and how their networks are actually behaving under real world conditions.”
A Commitment to Community and Collaboration
At the heart of this partnership is a mutual belief in the power of open source to drive innovation and progress. Both NetBox Labs and Stardust Systems have built their platforms with the community in mind, ensuring that users have the resources they need to succeed in an ever-evolving networking landscape.
This alliance also reflects both companies’ dedication to supporting and growing their respective ecosystems. By sharing knowledge, tools, and best practices, NetBox Labs and Stardust Systems are fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation that benefits the entire network automation community.
“NetBox and SuzieQ are always thought of first when discussing network automation. They both have a great feature set, whilst also making it extremely easy for users to get started”, says Rick Donato, CEO and Founder of Packet Coders. “NetBox and SuzieQ really show the power of the community first approach where users can try tools, give feedback and learn from others easily. The results speak for themselves with both tools enjoying strong adoption as their userbases benefit from their expanding well-thought out feature sets.”
Looking Ahead
To learn more, join our webinar On July 9, 2024 where NetBox Labs Technical Advocate Rich Bibby will join Stardust Systems’ CEO Dinesh Dutt to discuss this new partnership and the new capabilities announced in SuzieQ 2.8, including hands-on demonstrations to help you get started right away.
