DENVER, Nov. 20, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today at AutoCon 2, NetBox Labs announced the upcoming launch of two new network observability products in the NetBox stack, NetBox Discovery and NetBox Assurance. Both products further deepen the value in the NetBox ecosystem and address critical challenges for network and infrastructure teams operating complex environments.
NetBox Discovery enables operators to gather and ingest network and infrastructure information into NetBox to rapidly document the IT footprint within NetBox’s model. The product seamlessly facilitates fast onboarding of infrastructure into NetBox, and accelerates the journey to intent-based automation with NetBox as the source of truth.
NetBox Assurance enables operators to identify, understand, and mitigate operational drift - deviations in the infrastructure from the intended state and configuration. With NetBox Assurance, teams can leverage NetBox’s source of truth alongside NetBox Discovery and other data sources to constantly identify, analyze, and report on drift across their infrastructure. The product provides the insights needed to establish remediation plans and quickly make decisions and take action on every deviation. NetBox Assurance speeds up troubleshooting, reduces outages, and unlocks the path to automation.
“NetBox is the world’s most popular network and infrastructure source of truth,” said Kris Beevers, CEO, NetBox Labs. “Network and infrastructure operations and automation are driven by data. Our goal with NetBox Discovery and NetBox Assurance is to enable IT teams to rapidly build the source of truth and eliminate operational drift by giving them powerful tools for finding, characterizing, and acting on deviations from intended configurations. We’ve worked closely with dozens of NetBox Labs customers and the NetBox community to solve discovery and assurance. These new products reshape the landscape by delivering a tightly integrated suite, alongside NetBox, for network and infrastructure operations, observability, automation, and security.”
Observing the operational state of your infrastructure is critical to modern intent-based automation where operational drift results in risks and failures. NetBox Discovery and NetBox Assurance provide critical tools to identify and manage drift, resulting in:
- Improved security and compliance - identify and address deviations from intent that break compliance policies and expose surface area for attacks against your network
- Accelerated automation - automate with confidence knowing that you have tools to quickly identify and remedy deviations caused by manual changes made by operators in error or during triage
- Complete observability - get a 360° view of your infrastructure, where drift is happening, how, and why
Quickly make sense of your network with NetBox Discovery
NetBox Discovery makes it easy to quickly find networked resources, gather details about their configuration, and ingest the data into NetBox’s comprehensive and cohesive network and infrastructure data model. The tool leverages an agent-based approach with fine grained control and a zero-trust architecture, making it easy to deploy NetBox Discovery agents across segmented networks with rigid security controls and to parallelize discovery operations for performance in large, complex environments. The product will be released as a public preview for use by the NetBox community later this year, with an initial focus on network and device discovery and wide coverage of common network infrastructure.
“NetBox Discovery is going to substantially accelerate the path to NetBox adoption by enabling teams to quickly ingest data about their environments into the NetBox data model, find and remediate issues, and observe changes in infrastructure over time,” said Dave Kempe, Managing Director, Sol1. “NetBox Discovery is a natural addition to the NetBox ecosystem and it’s great to see a first party discovery solution that’s native to NetBox, built and maintained by NetBox Labs, and available to the community.”
Burn down operational drift and keep it in check with NetBox Assurance
NetBox Assurance delivers power tools for managing operational drift atop NetBox Discovery and NetBox. When NetBox is used as a source of truth for network and infrastructure configuration, NetBox Assurance combines with NetBox Discovery to provide a comprehensive view of deviations in the infrastructure from the intended configuration. As NetBox Discovery observes the operational state of your infrastructure, it pushes its observations to NetBox Assurance, which detects deviations from NetBox. In addition to leveraging the data from NetBox Discovery, NetBox Assurance goes even further: any source that pushes data into NetBox via Diode, the NetBox data ingestion service - such as third party discovery tools, data integrations, or custom tools - can be used to find deviations with NetBox Assurance. NetBox Assurance operates continuously rather than in a batch approach like other tools, enabling rapid remediation of drift, including by triggering automations.
Finding deviations from intended configurations helps operators keep the network in check. NetBox Assurance goes further by providing powerful tools for managing overall operational drift. First, NetBox Assurance delivers detailed analytics on drift across your infrastructure, including tools for granular exploration of drift. This visibility enables teams to build plans, set goals, allocate resources, and adapt processes to eliminate causes of drift. And then, NetBox Assurance’s fine-grained workflows enable operators to manage and remediate individual deviations quickly as they arise, keeping drift down and reducing time to resolution for issues in the network. NetBox Assurance is tightly integrated with NetBox and benefits from the context of the data in NetBox, NetBox’s powerful workflows for managing changes with branching and change management, and more.
“Operational drift is an enormous problem for organizations with complex, dynamic network environments,” said Matěj Lanča, Systems Engineer, ALEF. “NetBox Assurance is exciting because it gives us the ability to understand and explore operational drift in our network with respect to our source of truth, NetBox. With NetBox Assurance we’ll be able to plan strategic efforts to reduce drift, and manage deviations individually across our footprint too. This will help ensure our network’s reliability and give us more confidence in changes, along with streamlining our workflows for keeping drift in check.”
NetBox Assurance will launch for customer preview by NetBox Labs customers in the next few months.
Learn more about NetBox Discovery and NetBox Assurance
NetBox Discovery and NetBox Assurance are both slated for launch in the coming months, with many more details coming soon. Sign up for updates on the products and opportunities to get hands on, by visiting netboxlabs.com/netbox-discovery and netboxlabs.com/netbox-assurance.
About NetBox Labs
NetBox Labs makes sense of complex networks and infrastructure. We enable network and IT teams to accelerate automation by delivering open, composable products and supporting the network and infrastructure automation community.
NetBox Labs is the commercial steward of open source NetBox, the world’s most popular platform for operating, automating, and securing networks and infrastructure.
NetBox Labs offers products including NetBox Enterprise and NetBox Cloud for deploying, operating, and scaling NetBox with advanced features for security, collaboration, and automation. The company also offers NetBox Discovery to accelerate network and infrastructure documentation and observability, and NetBox Assurance to enable operators to identify, understand, and mitigate operational drift.
NetBox powers tens of thousands of companies, and NetBox Labs is backed by investment from Notable Capital, Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt, Flybridge, IBM, Salesforce Ventures, Mango Capital, and many other world class investors.
Contact
Kiley Nichols, Head of Marketing
knichols@netboxlabs.com
