How a $400B retirement services firm built its network system of record with NetBox Copilot
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switches provisioned in minutes through natural language
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engineer stood up the full environment
Company
A Leading Retirement Services Firm
Customer Snapshot
Audit reports on demand
An IP utilization report that used to take days is now a button the team's manager clicks to hand auditors a CSV in minutes.
Bulk builds through conversation
Four virtual chassis stacks, 32 switches in total, created in minutes with correct naming and accurate models, just by describing them to Copilot.
A security gap closed before audit
Once live VPN data was visible, the team found a tunnel that should have been decommissioned three months earlier and remediated it.
A leading retirement services firm with over $400 billion in assets runs hundreds of network devices across three datacenters, remote offices, and the cloud.
"NetBox Labs is literally the person sitting there beside you that allows you to do things and help augment things and accelerate everything you're trying to do at such an unbelievable amount of speed."
Senior Network Engineer
Leading Retirement Services Firm
The Challenge
Hundreds of devices, three datacenters, and no documentation to start from
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“
We had no historical knowledge, nothing to go off of.
Senior Network Engineer
Leading Retirement Services Firm Years of legacy monitoring tools and spreadsheets had left nothing to migrate and no documentation to reference.
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And the pressure was already on
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Global scale
Hundreds of devices across three datacenters, remote offices, and cloud, spanning North America and Asia.
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Audit every season
A financial services firm answering to rigorous compliance and audit requirements.
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An AI mandate
Every team told to adopt AI, in a role where one network mistake is visible to everyone.
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After validating the data model on a laptop install of NetBox Community, the team chose NetBox Cloud so they could spend their time building data instead of maintaining infrastructure. “We looked at the cloud offering and said, perfect, that’s what we want.”
The Solution
NetBox Copilot became the engine. One engineer built the network, the reports, and the automation through conversation.
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Building the network with natural language
Virtual chassis in minutes
The engineer described four virtual chassis stacks, the switch models, and the naming standard. Copilot iterated through all 32 switches and created them correctly, work that would otherwise mean hours of point-and-click or custom scripting.
Carrier spreadsheets turned into structured data▼Handed a sprawling circuit provider spreadsheet, Copilot asked clarifying questions, proposed an approach, and built circuits, terminations, and contacts as clean relational data.
VPN infrastructure from firewall JSON▼Copilot built the full VPN infrastructure from exported firewall data, then checked its own work against the live firewalls and corrected the discrepancies it found.
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Audit readiness and security
Talk to our team about compliance reporting Audit reports in minutes
Copilot suggested tagging the relevant prefixes, wrote the reporting script, and helped set up a Git-based data source so the report refreshes on demand. When auditors asked for the inverse report on unused address space, Copilot generated it immediately.
A stale VPN tunnel found and fixed▼With live data in an interface the team could easily read, they spotted a tunnel still active three months after it should have been decommissioned, and remediated it before it became an audit finding.
Data model guidance built in▼The engineer used Copilot as an advisor on contacts, circuits, prefixes, and how they relate, so the instance was built on best practices from day one.
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Automation the whole team can use
Explore the NetBox Labs platform CI/CD for configuration changes
With Copilot’s help the team built Jenkins pipelines for configuration change reporting, a capability they had never had before.
Live device data through natural language▼They connected the NetBox API to Claude through the MCP server and paired it with a pyATS MCP server to query live device data in plain language.
Engineers who never scripted, now automating▼Engineers who had never written a Python script are now running automated workflows across the entire infrastructure.
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Seeing the network with Visual Explorer
Rack views without a site visit
Rack and room visualizations let the team direct local staff during installs and troubleshooting in countries they can’t easily visit.
BGP topology from live data▼Topology views generate directly from NetBox data, so every change shows up immediately instead of waiting on a hand-drawn diagram.
A map that works across languages▼The large support team in Asia clicks a location on the map to get contacts, equipment, and site details, a navigation interface that visually transcends language.
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"NetBox Labs is literally the person sitting there beside you that allows you to do things and help augment things and accelerate everything you're trying to do at such an unbelievable amount of speed."
Senior Network Engineer
Leading Retirement Services Firm
The Results
One engineer, one platform, and a network team that now runs on it every day
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Where the platform goes next
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Today
A living system of record
NetBox Cloud, NetBox Copilot, and Visual Explorer, used by the whole team.
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Next
NetBox Discovery
Continuous, automated discovery keeps devices and their attributes current without manual work.
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Then
NetBox Assurance
Validation on top of that foundation flags drift, misconfigurations, and policy violations in real time.
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For a firm managing over $400 billion in assets, adding NetBox Discovery and NetBox Assurance turns the system of record into an active layer of risk reduction and compliance.
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