The NetBox community is truly special, contributing in so many ways to expand NetBox’s functionality, help those who are new to NetBox or are expanding their use cases, and creating myriad resources – from plugins and device types, to tutorials and documentation, and more.
One challenge as NetBox has grown in the scale and adoption of the project is that all these incredible resources have emerged organically. As a result, navigating the community to find the content or resources you need is hard. Is there a plugin for that? Has anyone written a tutorial on the topic I’m working on? Where are the docs? Where’s the device type library again?
At NetBox Labs we are working to reduce the friction and make it easy to find the resources and content you need to be successful with NetBox. We’re starting by bringing an open source content directory for NetBox (and also Orb, our other major open source network observability project) into the NetBox Labs website, which you can see in our new “Open Source” menu. We’ve also merged the content from the lightweight “NetBox.dev” website into the NetBox Labs site, including historical release notes and other blog posts, and we’ll announce new releases of NetBox OSS on the NetBox Labs blog.
NetBox Training, Usability and Philosophy
We have big plans to continue to improve the discoverability and experience of key content for the NetBox community. A few highlights:
- Education is in focus – Network engineers love to learn and develop new skills, and that’s made the NetBox Zero to Hero Course a tremendous success. We’ve recently announced a free monthly live, instructor led NetBox Basics training accessible to all. And we’ve also added a deeper hands-on, half-day training option for those who really want to dig into the NetBox Fundamentals. We’ve got more up our sleeves on this front in 2024, and we also want to feature other great learning resources in the community, so if you’ve built or come across something great, let us know so we can help amplify it!
- Plugin discovery is about to get better – We’ve been working hard to improve the plugin experience in NetBox Cloud, with features like plugin compatibility checks for NetBox upgrades. Even more importantly, we’ve got some big announcements in the coming weeks on improving trust and usability of plugins for NetBox OSS, and you can expect the experience of finding, installing, updating, and using key plugins to get substantially better this year. For now, check out our new Plugin catalog featuring high quality plugins from the NetBox community!
- Our open source principles guide our entire strategy at NetBox Labs – We put our community first, we seek to create a virtuous circle between our commercial business and open source investment, and we are building an open, composable technology ecosystem around NetBox. These guiding principles have resulted in everything from the NetBox Heroes podcast featuring stories and learnings from our community, to the NetBox Community Fund and our Plugin Bounty Program.
We’re excited to bring the NetBox community together, make finding NetBox resources easier, and invest in valuable content for our community. Got ideas for how we can help? We’re all ears – find the NetBox Labs team on the NetDev Slack and reach out!
