netbox-community/netbox

NetBox is an open-source tool that acts as the central "source of truth" for everything in a computer network. Think of it as a structured database for the physical and logical pieces of network infrastructure, racks, devices, cables, IP addresses, VLANs, circuits from telecom providers, power feeds, VPNs, and more. Instead of tracking all this in spreadsheets, network engineers record the intended state of their network in NetBox. NetBox does not talk to network devices directly. Its job is to describe what the network should look like and make that description available to automation, monitoring, and assurance tools through programmable APIs. Device configurations can be generated by feeding NetBox's data through user-written Jinja2 templates and pushed to devices using external tools like Ansible or Salt. It also includes a customizable permission system, custom validation rules that block invalid changes or unsafe deletions, a custom-scripts feature that runs admin-defined workflows from the UI, automated event rules that fire scripts or webhooks when objects change, and a complete change log of every create, modify, and delete. You would use NetBox if you operate a network bigger than a few devices, a data center, an internet service provider, a large enterprise, and want one authoritative place automation tools can read from instead of scraping live equipment. It is also a successor to older IPAM (IP address management) and DCIM (data center infrastructure management) apps. NetBox is written in Python on the Django web framework, licensed Apache 2.0, with translations into 16 languages and managed cloud and enterprise editions from NetBox Labs.