It is official! Canadian Web Hosting has deployed DCIM software NetBox Digital Oceans open source Data Center Infrastructure Management application. It’s powerful! and best of all it is 100% free!
What is NetBox, you ask?
Well, technically speaking it was designed as an innovative web application that works for IPAM and DCIM. It was specifically crafted for network engineers, system administrators, and data center techs alike by helping them seamlessly and easily manage. their infrastructure. It is written in Python and utilized the Django framework along with a PostgreSQL database. I think we have looked at every DCIM in the marketplace and NetBox is comparable to similar applications like NIPAP, RackTables, the NOC Project, Device 42, and phpIPAM. While NetBox is similar to these applications, it is also more advanced providing a variety of tools that do not exist within these older applications, while boasting several guiding tenets. In our case, we have actually found that the model deployed closely aligns with our own management and infrastructure systems here at Canadian Web Hosting
One, Singularly Converged Database
Okay, you are saying what is a singularly converged database? There are many ways in which NetBox sets itself apart from similar applications. But I would describe it like this – the navigation between the physical and logical infrastructure is completely seamless. Many comparable open source IPAM tools allow for little functionality when it comes to keeping track of physical connections. In contrast, NetBox supplies both IPAM and DCIM functionality all in one house so to speak.
Mirroring the Real World
NetBox sets out with the goal of mirroring the real world as closely and accurately as possible. For example, many of the tools out there currently demand that you define one specific IP address to your device. That however, is not the way the real world actually operates. More often, IP addresses are not designated to devices. Instead, they are assigned to specific interfaces within a specific device. These interfaces are known to have multiple IP addresses. NetBox was created to minimize the degree of the construct that is needed to represent a legitimate network. As a web hosting and cloud hosting company, this is very much in line with our specific infrastructure and its practical functionality makes a lot of sense.
The Complicated IP Hierarchy
NetBox utilizes PostgreSQL’s type of network data in order to build a hearty, efficient hierarchy full of IP addresses and prefixes. For instance, if you define a prefix as 192.168.0.64/24 and then proceed to create 192.168.0.64/26 inside of it. NetBox will present the child prefix under its parent prefix alongside available allocations of 192.168.0.0/26 and 192.168.0.0/25. IP objects are then arranged as a series of hierarchies demarcated at their base as arbitrary aggregate networks. In addition, all IP objects can be assigned to VRF if you wish.
What does NetBox NOT do?
NetBox is capable of quite a bit in the way of innovation. However, on the same token, it is important to also understand what NetBox does not do.
- NetBox is in no way a network monitoring system. There is a plethora of these monitor systems in existence already. NetBox can however, inform your monitoring system on what to monitor.
- NetBox is not a ticketing system. Nor does it track problems or any outages. What is does do is provide a convenient way to link with objects from an existing ticketing system.
- NetBox is not a network discovery application. It will not automatically discover the network for the user. It is designed to properly signify the correct state of your network, which can then be designated by a human.
- NetBox does not provide DNS service, although it can be utilized for the population of records for BIND and other DNS services.
Keep following Canadian Web Hosting to learn more about our implementation of Netbox and how it helps us manage our own infrastructure across multiple data centers, multiple regions and multiple services.
