Hagerty Eliminates Engineering Busywork and Accelerates Infrastructure Time-to-value with NetBox

Overview

Hagerty, a leading provider of specialty vehicle insurance, expert car valuation data and insights, live and digital car auction services, immersive events and automotive entertainment custom made for the 67 million Americans who self-describe as car enthusiasts, faced the challenge of effectively documenting and managing their data center infrastructure without requiring frequent on-site visits.  

Within this growing organization we meet Jake Herioux, a Systems Engineer on the Hagerty Infrastructure Operations Team who has personally been using NetBox Community since version 1.9. “I remember Global Search being introduced as a new feature and how much easier it was to navigate and find devices,” recalls Herioux, whose enthusiasm for NetBox’s capabilities has been a driving force behind its adoption at Hagerty.  Herioux introduced NetBox to Hagerty in the Fall of 2022 and what began as a proof-of-concept for planning rack space has since evolved into a comprehensive documentation and planning solution that transformed their infrastructure management approach.

Background

Hagerty operates two primary data centers in an active-active metro cluster configuration, leveraging Metro Ethernet for connectivity.  The infrastructure supports identical equipment in both locations, allowing them to run workloads in either data center and shift workloads between the two as needed. Their environment includes compute, network, and storage infrastructure with blade systems for compute and separate management clusters, all predominantly built on Cisco networking equipment.

As a remote-first organization, Hagerty needed a way for engineers to document, plan, and manage their physical infrastructure without constant site visits. Herioux explains, “Our team needed a way to be able to track the physical configurations of our data centers without having to send an engineer on-site. This not only helps with knowing what we have in our racks, but also being able to plan new hardware deployments down to the patch cables, patch panel ports, and even power cables.”

Solution Implementation

Herioux’s approach to implementing NetBox combined strategic documentation with practical applications. He started by gathering high-resolution photos of rack configurations, then reverse-engineered them to build accurate digital models.

“It was primarily a side project for me, just kind of working on it when I had time,” Herioux shares. “A lot of it was my own curiosity, just wanting to flesh that out and show how useful this tool could be.”

This grassroots implementation gradually expanded as Jake demonstrated its value through weekly “NetBox Fun” meetings where he and a colleague would explore new ways to utilize the platform. These sessions eventually grew to include other team members, creating a collaborative learning environment.

The depth of documentation is impressive – from server hardware and network equipment to power distribution. “We track all of our power cables from devices to PDUs,” Herioux notes. “I’ve actually got an entire power plan all the way up to the UPSs in the different rooms all mapped out using the power circuits.”

Core Network Migration: NetBox in Action

The true value of NetBox revealed itself during a recent project involving new core switching and copper & fiber cabling, all of which was planned out in NetBox before making a purchase. What started as Jake volunteering to help with planning transformed into a comprehensive documentation effort that enabled the project to start on solid footing. The Bill of Materials (BOM) for the new cabling including patch panels, keystone jacks, fiber enclosures, cassettes, and patch cables were all generated based on the digital Model Jake and team had created in NetBox. 

“We were able to leverage NetBox to plan an entire core network migration and we can now say that ALL physical connections to our core network are documented from end-to-end,” Jake enthusiastically explains. “That project has really highlighted just how valuable NetBox is to our operations.”

The migration involved approximately 650 patch cables across two data centers, connecting everything from network devices to servers, storage arrays, intra-device copper and fiber patch panels and even PDUs. Every connection was mapped in NetBox before implementation, with cable maps exported for on-site engineers.  “Representing the patch panels allows us to have true-to-physical digital cable traces of every connection in the data centers”, says Jake.  “We leverage multi-position Rear Ports in NetBox not only for fiber cassettes, but also for copper patch panels to reduce the number of connections between the racks which keeps the Topology Views Plugin clean.”

NetBox’s branching feature proved key to the migration’s success. “Branching was instrumental to our core migration. We specifically upgraded NetBox to a version that supported Branching prior to planning the migration so we could use its features to track the difference between the new and old,” Herioux explains. This capability allowed the team to visualize the planned changes while maintaining their current documentation, creating a parallel version of their infrastructure that could be tested and verified before implementation.

One particularly clever innovation was their use of NetBox-generated IDs for cable labeling. “For a cable to receive a label, it must be modeled in NetBox first to generate the cable ID,” Herioux explains. “Populating the Cable ID in the ‘Label’ field also makes the ID searchable from within Global Search, making it extremely easy to locate and then view the Cable Trace for any connection in the data center.”

The implementation approach was meticulously planned: new cables were pre-run to the new cores and attached to existing cabling with velcro, allowing on-site engineers to simply swap cables at endpoints during the cutover. This preparation enabled each data center migration to be completed in approximately three hours, with zero downtime for the layer one and layer two cutover.

“A majority of the work in each datacenter was completed within a 3-hour timeframe,” Herioux proudly notes. “None of that would have been possible without the extensive planning we did in NetBox to proactively plan out every single connection in advance.”

Benefits and Future Plans

The impact of NetBox at Hagerty has been substantial. Remote engineers can now confidently plan and implement changes without frequent site visits, saving “countless days, hours, and weeks of on-site engineering time” according to Jake. This remote capability is enhanced by their telepresence robot (whose name is Hammy!), which Jake used extensively when documenting their infrastructure and planning the migration.

NetBox has also become integral to their procurement and planning processes. “As part of our post-purchase planning, we model all hardware and connections in NetBox as well as we are able,” Herioux explains. “Sometimes this happens even earlier as we are evaluating solutions and want to get accurate counts for the BOM.”

Looking forward, Herioux envisions taking their NetBox implementation to the next level through automation. “The next step for us is embracing automation. We heavily utilize Ansible elsewhere in the environment, so I’ve already written some basic playbooks to query network devices for their current configuration and update NetBox with the data.”

His enthusiasm for future possibilities is palpable: “The next step is to flip that around and start using NetBox to generate configs and push out changes. I’ve seen some great things with NetBox Discovery, Change Control, and Assurance, and I can’t wait to get my hands on those.”

Conclusion

What began as one engineer’s side project has grown into an essential infrastructure management tool at Hagerty, supporting the IT operations behind a company that insures 2.6 million vehicles in the U.S., Canada and UK. The success has brought recognition within the organization and excitement about future possibilities.

Herioux’s passion for documentation and planning through NetBox has not only improved operational efficiency but also demonstrated the value of thorough infrastructure documentation. As he puts it, “Documentation is the primary goal right now. We want to know where everything is so that we can appropriately plan for making changes. We have regulatory requirements for documentation and NetBox makes it easy to check that box.”

From planning rack space to enabling seamless network migrations, NetBox has transformed how Hagerty manages its infrastructure, proving that even the seemingly mundane task of documentation can deliver extraordinary value when implemented with enthusiasm and vision.

Herioux’s continuing enthusiasm for NetBox is evident in his day-to-day discoveries: “It’s a good day! I just found out that we can use sub-modules and Interface templates that reference both the parent and child modules. This product continues to amaze me!”