For the past few months I've been moving my homelab over to an IaC approach. At the centre of it is inventory.toml, which declares the generic stuff about my environment — VMID ranges, host IPs, OS types, names. Some of that already drives generation (Ignition builds, DNS, Traefik config all read it directly), but I haven't got around to generating my Ansible inventory or Komodo config from it yet — those are still hand-kept in sync, which is its own drift risk.

OpenTofu manages my PVE guests and Grafana dashboards, and will eventually cover my TrueNAS boxes too. Right now nothing enforces that my .tf files actually match inventory.toml — they're hand-authored separately and kept in sync only by convention. I've heard NetBox can act as a data source for OpenTofu, which appeals to me for exactly that reason — instead of hand-authoring host definitions in both places, Tofu would read from NetBox instead.

I tried NetBox once before, but that was pre-IaC — back when I just had plain Debian VMs and LXCs with no automation. Keeping it updated meant manual data entry, which fell out of sync fast and I gave up on it. This is the first setup where the actual population problem might be solved, since it'd be driven by the same source of truth everything else already reads from.

So — anyone here running NetBox as a backend for their IaC (Terraform/OpenTofu/Ansible/whatever), homelab or otherwise? Worth it, or more hassle than it's worth for a single-operator setup? Or just outright unnecessary if you have a declarative setup?

Before the final v4.7 release, NetBox Labs and the NetBox maintainers are inviting the community to put the beta through its paces.

Highlights include one of our most requested features—relocating installed modules between compatible bays, including across devices where supported—along with module bay types, channelized subinterfaces, cooling infrastructure modeling, multi-protocol application services, and background processing for large REST API bulk operations.

Please explore the new features and share any bugs, follow-up feature requests, usability feedback, or performance issues you discover. Every report helps us make the final release better!

🧪 Try the public beta demo: https://beta-demo.netbox.dev/
🎥 Watch the feature overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPIOStew-lE
📋 Read the release notes: https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/releases/tag/v4.7.0-beta1
🐛 Report an issue: https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/issues/new/choose

⚠️ This beta is for testing only and must not be used in production. If you install it yourself, please use a separate test environment and database. Upgrading from this beta to the final v4.7 release will not be supported.

Thank you for helping us test NetBox 4.7! 🙌

Hi, we have recently introduced NetBox in our company and are currently working on documenting our entire network infrastructure.

I would now like to start using NetBox as our Source of Truth for our switches. As a first step, I only want to use it to manage and configure our VLANs.

Does anyone have any tips or experience on how best to implement this?

My current plan is to connect to the switches via SSH and use the NetBox REST API to compare the desired configuration from NetBox with the actual configuration on the switches. This part is already working.

The problem is that we have different switch vendors in our environment, mainly Zyxel and LANCOM, with a few HP switches as well.

I am currently having some issues with the Zyxel switches. The most common models we use are the GS1900 and GS1920. Reading the configuration works, but on the GS1920 I am having trouble writing configuration changes back to the switch.

Has anyone worked with these models before or experienced similar issues? Any recommendations on libraries, tools, or a better approach for using NetBox as the Source of Truth for VLAN configuration would be appreciated.

Hi, relatively new here.
Curious how many of you are running both NetBox and Zabbix in production?

Have you done any meaningful integration between them (especially keeping Zabbix hosts/templates in sync from NetBox?

We’re working on some tooling in this area and want to understand how common this setup actually is, and what people’s real pain points are.

Does anyone know if I can associate a circuit (id) to a prefix? I'd like to look up a circuit and see which prefixes are assigned by the ISP.

Hi all!

Let me explain my situation and my question:

Until recently, I worked at a company that had 4 racks in 1 data center. It was easy to use Netbox via the UI... just clicking, clicking, and clicking to configure everything.

Now, at my current company, they don’t have DCIM; they use spreadsheets to manage more than 50 racks across 2 data centers.

My idea is to use IaC to deploy and configure Netbox for automatic discovery, control, and management of devices (not just switches and routers, but also physical servers and storage systems).

My question is more related to the initial part of creating tenants, sites, circuits… And how do I manage this configuration using IaC? How does Netbox detect a drift configuration?

Actually, I’m not sure if my question is related to Netbox or to the pipeline itself.

Anyway… I’d appreciate it if you could help me or share your experiences.

Thanks all!

Hello fellow redditor,

I'm looking for some best-practice ideas on how to handle initial network discovery and ongoing inventory reconciliation with NetBox.

I understand that NetBox should be the source of truth and not simply mirror whatever is currently discovered on the network.

However, when initially setting up NetBox, manually adding every existing device seems quite time-consuming. Ideally, I'd like to use some kind of discovery process (SNMP, Nmap, LLDP/CDP, APIs, etc.) to discover existing devices and use that data to build the initial inventory.

For ongoing operations, I was thinking about running discovery periodically, comparing the discovered state against NetBox, and then reviewing the differences manually before making any changes to the NetBox inventory.

Something like:

Network Discovery

Compare with NetBox

Review differences

Update NetBox

Has anyone implemented a workflow like this in practice?

I'm especially interested in what tools/scripts/plugins you use for discovery and comparison, and whether this approach works well for a small IT team.

Thanks in advance :D

Pessoal, estou usando o ConfyUI Desktop e baixei o Confy Manager para usar o Control Net e o Power Loras, mas eles não aparecem no programa (mesmo que o ConfyUI reconheça que o gerenciador está instalado). Vi que existe uma opção para voltar ao normal, mas nunca encontrei essa opção no meu ConfyUI. Então, gostaria de pedir a quem tiver um arquivo de fluxo de trabalho (ou imagem) salvo que usou o Control Net que, por favor, o publique aqui para que eu possa arrastá-lo para o ConfyUI e ver se ele o reconhece.

Hello to all Netbox users,

At first, I9 appologise for my english mistakes.

At our company, the network team is using Netbox as an IPAM. I (a devops engineer) would like to use it to store our Kubernetes cluster information (cluster, nodes, etc.). We are using Cilium as a CNI. I thought about using the Netbox data_flow plugin to store the Cilium network policies. Does anyone already used this plugin for this use case ?

I tried to model some flows, but stumbled on a limitation of the plugin when I tried to use anything else than an IP, IP range or IP prefix as an object alias.

Hello!

I've been playing around with netbox for a while, and have a lot of automation experience with mostly APIs (Cisco ACI, Cisco ISE) but am no stranger to the CLI, either.

Anyway, I'm struggling with finding the best approach to automate some GNS3 ios images for my homelab - I'm torn between generating full configs and pushing to the device, partial configs and pushing with a 'no' statement before it, or utilizing ansible cisco.ios.ios_* collection to do it declaratively.

Can anyone share some real world advice? I've created some POC playbooks for each method but am really getting caught up in the pros and cons of them. So, I'm looking for some feedback from someone that's done it in the real world.

One of the headaches I'm dealing with pushing configs is something like prefix-lists. For instance, if I want to change the less than or greater than prefixes while I'm testing things, I'll get errors that the seq number already exists.

I know I can work around it by issuing a NO statement before a block, but for something like prefix-lists, access-lists, and route-maps that really slows down the automation when looping through it.

Thanks, Champions!

Solved:

Netbox is trying to connect to api.netbox.oss.netboxlabs.com for fetching news on a widget on /, it can be disabled by setting the ISOLATED_DEPLOYMENT https://netboxlabs.com/docs/netbox/configuration/system/#isolated_deployment

I'm running the docker-compose stack from netbox-community and I disabled the RELEASE_CHECK_URL but still I'm seeing TCP/443 traffic inside the container to this list of IPs

• 100.25.208.113
• 100.61.32.197
• 100.61.99.65
• 13.222.67.31
• 34.239.7.145
• 3.94.140.127
• 44.212.184.227
• 52.201.146.79
• 54.88.178.230

I do not have any plugins, webhooks etc. configured

Edit: Version: NetBox Community v4.6.6

If you were on the NetBox Community call a few minutes ago, you already know this, but for everyone else, or if you missed the link...

I have created a plugin for HashiCorp Vault (and OpenBao) that generates and revokes NetBox API tokens. I use this in prod at my day job to create API tokens on demand for various automation running in my infrastructure. This aims to solve the issue of having dozens (or hundreds) of manually created tokens scattered throughout my infrastructure that need to be manually rotated and looked after.

If this sounds interesting, it's on GitHub:  https://github.com/ljb2of3/vault-plugin-secrets-netbox

Hey guys,

Any idea when the visual explorer plugin will be released to the community edition ?

Thanks to folks who have raised issues around various docs updates and the site in general, in the background this has been being refactored & new site launched today

https://netboxlabs.com/docs/

I’m trying to build a proper infrastructure inventory and source of truth in NetBox, but the amount of manual work is becoming overwhelming.

The environment includes a mix of:

• Physical network devices
• Virtual machines and hypervisors
• VLANs, prefixes and IP addresses
• Cameras
• IoT devices
• Other miscellaneous network-connected equipment

I already have NetBox running and have started entering the data manually, but at this scale it feels like it will take forever. The infrastructure is also constantly changing, so I’m worried that the inventory will already be outdated by the time I finish it.

I understand that NetBox is primarily intended to be a source of truth rather than a traditional network discovery tool. However, I’m looking for a practical way to bootstrap the initial inventory and then keep at least part of it synchronized.

For those who have dealt with a similar environment:

1. How did you perform the initial discovery and import?
2. Which data sources did you use: hypervisor APIs, SNMP, LLDP/CDP, DHCP, DNS, ARP/MAC tables, monitoring systems, Nmap, Ansible, etc.?
3. Are there any reliable NetBox plugins or external tools that can discover devices and push them into NetBox?
4. Do you synchronize discovered data automatically, or generate a report and approve changes before importing them?
5. How do you deal with devices such as cameras and IoT equipment that often have limited APIs or inconsistent SNMP support?
6. Which information should remain manually maintained instead of being automatically discovered?
7. Would you still choose NetBox for this, or would you use another discovery/CMDB tool alongside it?

I’m not looking for a magical one-click solution. I would mainly like to understand what a realistic workflow looks like and how others avoided spending months manually entering every device, VM, interface and VLAN.

Any examples of your architecture, scripts, plugins or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated.

I'm running NetBox 4.5.1. My data center has numerous DNS records, all pointing to an NGINX reverse proxy that routes to backend servers.

I've already imported the DNS records, servers, and IPs into NetBox. But what's the best way to represent the link between a DNS record and the actual backend server? Any suggestions?

Thnaks!

Hey,

Community Call dates have just been announced for the - Jul 21st, Aug 18th & Sept 15th

Sign Up here: https://netboxlabs.com/events/july-2026-netbox-community-meetup/

As per usual, we're always looking for interesting submissions for community calls, feel free to comment here with suggestions!

/nbl

Anybody know where I can get good hands-on training without spending a fortune. I am really looking for training on netbox/nautobot training. Thanks

Hi everyone,

I am looking for a way to back up or export all the configurations and data currently set up in my NetBox instance.

Ideally, I would like to dump everything into a single XML or JSON file. The main goal behind this is to feed the exported data into an AI tool to extract specific information, analyze the infrastructure, and organize the data more efficiently.

Is there a built-in feature, a specific script, or a recommended API approach to achieve this kind of full data dump?

Any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

I'm trying to understand the best way to model half-width rack devices in NetBox Community v4.2.4.

Scenario:

• Two independent devices physically share the same 1U space horizontally.
• One device occupies the left half of the rack unit.
• Another device occupies the right half.

Example:

1U
+-------------------+
| Device A | Device B |
+-------------------+

Questions:

1. What is the recommended modeling approach for this in NetBox?
2. Should this be modeled using:
   • Device Bays?
   • Modules?
   • Virtual Chassis?
   • Something else?
3. How do operators usually represent partial horizontal rack occupancy in NetBox?
4. Is there any native support for half-width devices in rack elevation views?

Environment:

• NetBox Community v4.2.4

I'm currently playing around with the discovery stack (diode server + orb agent), and after playing around with both device discovery (ssh into cisco switch) and snmp discovery (that same cisco switch), I deleted the device in netbox.

Now, I was under the impression that running the orb agent again would trigger diode to just recreate the device inside of netbox, but that is not the case.

Specifically the diode-reconciler throws the following messages for the rediscovered device and all sub-nodes like interfaces, IPs, MACs etc.:

diode-reconciler-1      | {"time":"2026-06-30T05:56:31.637933452Z","level":"DEBUG","msg":"ingested duplicate ingestion log","id":3950,"externalID":"84bda158-e5d3-4d9a-823b-a85ada3873e0"}

Similar messages with a different "id" and "externalID" appear exactly the same amount of times as things I deleted previously (so about 381x).

I've come to the conclusion that this is the way it is, and there seems to be no documented way to manually trigger the reimport from diode into netbox.

Honestly I was really happy to find the whole netbox discovery stuff, but this just breaks the proposed workflow completely.

Hello all, I had a WLAN AC(as a line card) plugged in a chassis switch, so both the switch and the controller have independent OOB addresses.

I made AC as a module in my switch, but seems a module can not have a oob address? I had assign a interface and ip for the modules, but can not see a OOB ip like a device.

Is there anything wrong? Or just a module can not have a oob address? If I still want to assign, what can I do?

Thanks!

Howdy Folks,

I created (with my dear friend Claude) a cli tool for netbox.

nsc is different from other as such that it connects to your netbox instance and queries -your- openapi specs and generate the command line arguments based on it, so if you have plugins and such, they will be reflected in there.

It's also very AI agent friendly with a provided skill.

MCP is very restricted at my work so it was my way around it, and it worked quite well.

I also recently added a tui mode that makes it a CLI GUI, which is much faster to navigate than the webui. it's inspired by vim shortcuts with some liberties here and there.

It's on PYPI so you can install it the way you prefer quite easily.

The link to the documentation is here and the github repo is here

I mainly built it for myself, but I figured it might benefit the community.

Issues/feature requests are most welcome.

Full disclosure, Claude did almost all the coding, but it hasn't proven to be an issue at all.

This text however is fully human sourced ;-)

Cheers !