From Spreadsheet Chaos to Peace of Mind Across Massive and Diverse Infrastructure

Overview

Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing serving over 24,000 customers worldwide including nearly 1,000 Global 2000 enterprises, faced growing challenges in managing assets across their complex infrastructure. With annual revenue exceeding $1.8 billion, Nutanix needed a comprehensive solution that could provide visibility across its heterogeneous environment spanning traditional data centers, virtual infrastructure, and multiple public clouds.

The solution came through a small, dedicated team within Nutanix IT who leveraged NetBox and expanded it through custom extensions and automation. What began as a solution to simplify office deployments evolved into a sophisticated crawler architecture that now serves as a unified system of record for Nutanix’s entire infrastructure landscape.

Background

Nutanix operates a complex hybrid multicloud environment that includes:

• Traditional on-premises data center infrastructure
• Nutanix’s own hyperconverged platform
• Multiple public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Various networking equipment (Cisco, Arista, Dell, Palo Alto, Juniper)

Before NetBox, Nutanix relied on disconnected systems including SolarWinds for data center management and Excel spreadsheets for IP address management. This fragmented approach created information silos, making it difficult to quickly locate assets, troubleshoot issues, or perform security incident response. To make matters worse, these tools were manually updated, which meant they were always out of date.

As Danko Trajkovic, Manager of Network Automation at Nutanix, recalls about their pre-NetBox environment: “Traditionally, they used tools like Excel, Confluence or Racktables.” These tools couldn’t scale with Nutanix’s growing infrastructure needs or provide the automation capabilities required for efficient operations.

The NetBox Revolution: Building a Better Way

Danko Trajkovic’s journey with NetBox began with a headache – building a new office in the Netherlands entirely manually. After finishing that project, he had an epiphany.

“After coming back from that project, I realized, whoa, we did all of this manually,” Trajkovic explains with a laugh. “I had a lot of time on my hands, and I chose to spend it figuring out how I’m never going to do it again like that.”

That frustration sparked what would become a complete transformation of Nutanix’s infrastructure management. Trajkovic started small, recruiting Milan Nikolic, a staff network automation engineer with previous NetBox experience, to help migrate their IP address management from scattered spreadsheets into NetBox.

Their approach wasn’t an overnight transformation. They locked down spreadsheets one by one, held meetings with colleagues, and essentially asked for trust. “You need to trust us. This is going to change your life,” Trajkovic would tell them. And as it turned out, he was right.

As the team gained confidence, they set their sights on a bigger challenge – their cloud infrastructure. With no existing NetBox plugins to handle cloud resources, Milan took the lead on developing custom extensions despite having limited Django experience.

“We started with a basic NetBox tutorial for plugins and went from there, adding one model at a time,” Nikolic recalls. “When we added the first model and it actually worked, we were amazed! We really didn’t expect it to work so quickly.”

The real magic came with the development of their “crawler” architecture. The team created Python scripts that continuously scan their infrastructure – everything from network devices to cloud VMs – collecting data and feeding it back to NetBox. Eric Pearce, IT Systems Architect at Nutanix, describes it as digital explorers that map their infrastructure landscape and bring back valuable data.

These crawlers don’t just catalog – they detect changes, additions, and deletions, keeping NetBox current without manual intervention. The team even implemented a clever “crawler last seen” custom field to track when assets were last detected, helping identify equipment that might be ready for retirement.

Throughout the process, the NetBox community proved invaluable. “Whenever we faced a challenge, we’d post on the NetBox Slack, and within a day we’d get pointers on where to look,” says Nikolic. “The community is even better than the documentation, and the documentation is really good!”

Unleashing SuperPowers: The Game-Changing Benefits

Nutanix’s NetBox implementation hasn’t just improved things – it’s completely transformed how their teams work together. The impacts have rippled far beyond the networking team.

Seeing Through Walls (of Data)

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement is the unified view across all infrastructure domains. Pearce notes that this comprehensive visibility allows them to search across on-prem hardware, virtual infrastructure, and multiple clouds simultaneously, something few other systems can accomplish.

This capability has been a game-changer for security incident response. When the security team identifies a suspicious IP, they can instantly trace it to its source and owner without navigating multiple consoles or tracking down different teams. What used to take hours now takes seconds.

From Firefighting to Future-Proofing

The team now proactively manages their infrastructure rather than reactively responding to issues:

• They can quickly identify all devices running specific software versions when security vulnerabilities emerge
• Equipment approaching end-of-life is flagged well in advance, making budget planning smoother
• Capacity management – from rack space to chassis bay utilization – is visible at a glance

“Before, preparing for budget season meant weeks of data gathering,” says Trajkovic. “Now we run a report and have the information in minutes. It’s like going from the Stone Age to the Information Age in one leap.”

Automation Superpowers

While NetBox itself doesn’t automate operations, it’s become the foundation that powers Nutanix’s broader automation initiatives.

“NetBox doesn’t automate — it enables automation,” explains Trajkovic. With reliable data in a well-structured format, their other automation tools and scripts can work confidently, without the risk of operating on outdated information.

Milan Nikolic puts it more colorfully: “It’s like NetBox is the brain, and our automation scripts are the hands. The brain knows exactly what’s going on, and the hands can work precisely because of that knowledge.”

People Power Unleashed

Perhaps most importantly, the crawler architecture has freed the team from endless documentation tasks, allowing them to focus on innovation.

“Our crawlers are like having an extra team member who never sleeps, never complains, and has perfect memory,” says Pearce. “They handle the tedious part of keeping our inventory accurate, so we can work on things that actually move the needle for the business.”

The Road Ahead: What’s Next for Nutanix and NetBox

The Nutanix team isn’t resting on their laurels – they’re constantly exploring new frontiers with NetBox.

From Observer to Orchestrator

While NetBox currently serves primarily as a system of record, the team is excited about expanding its role as a system of intent.

“We’re eager to flip the script,” says Pearce. “Instead of just having NetBox document what our network is doing, we want it to tell our network what to do. We’re working on making changes in NetBox that would then automatically program devices – that’s the next big frontier for us.”

Expanding the Service Catalog

The team is working on integrating NetBox more deeply into their service delivery processes, using it to power automation that simplifies common IT requests.

The Nutanix team has developed a sophisticated four-stage model for their automation journey. Starting with manual execution, they progress through automation-aided solutions with custom forms and validation, to one-click automation with webhooks and CI/CD pipelines, and finally to zero-touch automation where tickets are processed automatically upon creation.

“We’ve got several projects in our backlog around automating our service catalogs,” Trajkovic explains. “When someone requests a new VLAN or network configuration, we want that to flow seamlessly from the request to NetBox to the actual implementation, with minimal human intervention.”

The team has already achieved impressive results with several catalog items. Their new VLAN request process now features an “implement” button in ServiceNow that creates a new network in their SDN in just 90 seconds, covering approximately 70% of all new VLAN creation scenarios. Even more impressive, their firewall policy change request automation leverages NetBox to identify relevant prefixes and firewalls, achieving automatic provisioning for 92% of requests.

Looking ahead, the team plans to automate several more catalog items in the coming quarter, including enabling/disabling LACP on servers, managing static and DHCP IP reservations, and implementing AV device whitelisting with NetBox and Radius.

Exploring New NetBox Labs Tools

The team is particularly enthusiastic about upcoming NetBox Labs offerings. “We’re really excited about Diode, NetBox Assurance and NetBox Discovery,” says Nikolic. “These tools could really help reduce our maintenance workload so we can focus on our automation initiatives!”

While Nutanix has already developed custom tools to collect and feed information to NetBox, they see significant value in adopting industry-standard solutions as they emerge. By transitioning to these streamlined community-developed tools, the team expects to reduce their custom code footprint, decrease maintenance overhead, and better align with industry standards—making their solutions more reusable and sustainable in the long run.

Conclusion

Nutanix’s story demonstrates how networking teams can use NetBox as the springboard from which to solve complex enterprise challenges. By developing custom plugins and building an automated crawler architecture, they’ve created a comprehensive system of record for their hybrid multicloud environment.

The project’s success goes beyond technical achievement — it has fundamentally changed how different teams within Nutanix collaborate and access infrastructure information. As Eric Pearce observes: “Once you have a trusted source of truth that is accessible via an API, people will start to consume the data in a manner that you could have never predicted or planned for. I think this is the ultimate validation for what we built.”

From its humble beginnings as a solution for office deployment to becoming the cornerstone of Nutanix’s infrastructure management strategy, NetBox has proven its value through enhanced visibility, operational efficiency, and as a foundation for ongoing automation initiatives.