Spares Management
Public Preview: Asset Lifecycle is in public preview. The functionality and API surface may evolve in future releases.
Most organisations keep some equipment in reserve - boxed switches in a storeroom, transceivers in a parts cabinet, cables on a shelf. The Spares Management area of the plugin lets you record what you hold, where it is, and what condition it is in, and then draw from those reserves to fulfil installation requirements without placing a new order.
Spares Pools
A spares pool is a named collection of spare equipment held at a specific location. A pool is anchored to a NetBox site, with an optional location within that site for finer-grained tracking - for example, "HQ - Cold Storage Room 3".
Pools are the unit of organisation for spares. Most teams will create one pool per physical storage area, or per logical grouping such as "hot spares" and "long-term reserve".
Spare Items
A spare item records one or more units of a specific equipment type held in a pool. Each item references the same set of types that BOM line items can - rack types, device types, module types, and cable types - and supports the same variant attributes (airflow direction for devices and modules, color and length for cables).
Each spare item also carries:
- A quantity representing how many units are present. Quantities greater than 1 are permitted only for items without a serial number or asset tag, since those identifiers apply to a single physical unit.
- An optional serial number.
- An optional asset tag, unique across the whole plugin.
- A status describing the item's condition.
Item Status
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Serviceable | The item is in working order and available to draw on. |
| Damaged | The item is present but unfit for use; flagged for repair or disposal. |
| Missing | The item is recorded but cannot currently be located. |
The Damaged and Missing statuses make spares pools useful as an audit tool as well as an inventory tool: a periodic walk-through of the storeroom can be reconciled against the records, with discrepancies marked rather than silently deleted.
Fulfilling From Spares
The point of recording spares is to be able to use them. Each BOM object - the per-instance record of a planned rack, device, module, or cable - carries a reference to the spare item drawn from inventory to fulfil it (or, alternatively, to the shipment that delivered new equipment for it).
To pull a spare from inventory, open the planned NetBox object's detail page and click Install, then choose Install from spares pool. Select the pool and a matching spare item - the form filters available spares to those whose type and variant exactly match the planned object's requirements. On submit, the BOM object is linked to the chosen spare item; the spare's quantity is decremented by one, and the record is deleted automatically when its quantity reaches zero.
This means that for any planned object the data model can answer:
- Was this delivered new, and if so on which shipment?
- Or was it pulled from spares, and if so from which pool and which physical unit?
Bulk Import
Spares pools and spare items can be bulk-imported from CSV via the Import button on each list view, which is the easiest way to seed the plugin from an existing spares spreadsheet.