Fleet Management quickstart

This guide takes you from nothing to a completed Discovery run, with results waiting for review in Assurance. It follows the shortest path and links out where you need more detail.

Public Preview - Fleet Management is in Public Preview for NetBox Cloud customers. Contact your account team to enable it for your organization.

Before you begin

You will need:

• Assurance enabled on NetBox Cloud.
  If you do not see Fleet management in the NetBox Labs Console navigation, contact your account team.
• A host that can run containers.
  Docker or Podman, with outbound network access and network reach to the devices you want to discover.
• A HashiCorp Vault or OpenBao instance holding your device credentials.
  The Console stores a reference to a secret in your vault, never the secret itself, so you need somewhere for it to point.

Step 1: Register and start an Orb agent

1. In the NetBox Labs Console, go to Fleet management → Orb agents and select New Agent.
2. Enter a Name for the agent, such as nyc-01, then select Save & Continue.
3. On the Next steps page, copy the provisioning command from the Docker or Podman tab.
4. Fill in the vault settings in the command so the agent can resolve credential references, then run the command on your host.
5. Wait for the agent to come online. It can take up to a minute, and the page updates on its own. Continue to agent details becomes available once the agent reports in.

For the full detail, see Manage Orb agents.

Step 2: Add a device credential

1. Go to Fleet management → Credentials and select New Credential.
2. Name the credential.
3. Enter the Username reference and Password reference as bare paths into your vault, such as my/path. To use a literal username instead, clear the Is Vault reference checkbox.
4. Save the credential.
5. Open it, select Add device, and bind it to the devices you plan to discover.

You can also do this inside the job wizard in the next step. For the full detail, see Manage device credentials.

Step 3: Run your first Discovery job

1. Go to Assurance → Discovery jobs and select New Job.
2. On Configuration, enter a Job name, choose the Device job type, and select the agent you registered in Step 1.
3. Leave Schedule empty so the job runs once. You can add a cron schedule later.
4. Select Next: Scope.
5. Everything listed is in scope by default. Remove the devices this first job should not touch, using the remove control on each row. Searching and filtering change only what you see, not what the job will do.
6. Make sure every remaining device has a credential in the Credential column. Set the Credential filter to Missing to find any that do not.
7. Select Create.

For the full detail, see Run Discovery jobs.

Step 4: See the results

1. Go to Assurance → Run history and confirm the run completed. A failed run carries a reason.
2. Go to Assurance → Deviations.
3. Open a deviation and read the comparison between what discovery observed and what NetBox documents.
4. Apply the ones that should update NetBox, and ignore the differences that are intentional.

Nothing reaches NetBox until you apply it. For the full detail, see Review and resolve deviations.

What's next

• Give the job a schedule. A job with a cron schedule keeps NetBox aligned with your network instead of showing a single snapshot. Continuous observation is the point of Assurance.
• Widen the scope. Add the devices you left out, or create a network discovery job to find what you have not documented at all.
• Add more agents. Register one per site or segment, and label them so the list stays navigable as the fleet grows.
• Read the Fleet Management overview for the concepts behind what you have set up.

Getting help

Contact your account team or NetBox Labs support.