NetBox

devops

Open-source network and infrastructure documentation tool covering IP management, data center layout, and device relationships. REST and GraphQL APIs included

#ipam#dcim#network#infrastructure#inventory#documentation
Alternative to SpreadsheetsRacktables

Quick Start

docker compose up

Overview

NetBox is the standard open-source tool for network infrastructure documentation. It gives network teams a single source of truth for IP address management (IPAM), data center infrastructure management (DCIM), and the relationships between them: which servers live in which racks, which interfaces connect to which switches, which IP ranges are allocated to which services.

The data model covers the physical and logical layers of infrastructure documentation: sites, racks, devices, interfaces, cables, power feeds, VLANs, prefixes, IP addresses, VRFs, and more. Everything links to everything else, so you can trace a physical cable to a logical interface to an IP to a service without switching tools.

A REST and GraphQL API makes NetBox the data layer other tools can pull from: provisioning scripts, monitoring systems, and automation tools can query NetBox to understand what exists and where it lives. The open-source community edition supports webhooks and custom scripts for extending the data model.

NetBox Labs offers commercial Cloud and Enterprise tiers built on the open-source project, adding real-time network state comparison, drift detection, and AI-assisted querying for organizations that need them.

The community edition is Apache 2.0-licensed with 20,000+ GitHub stars. Deployment uses Docker Compose. The typical user is a network engineer or infrastructure team at an organization with more than a handful of servers who has outgrown spreadsheet-based documentation.

Use Cases

Specific ways to use NetBox for your workflow.

01
IP address management (IPAM) across subnets, VLANs, and prefixes
02
Data center infrastructure documentation with racks and cable tracing
03
Source of truth for provisioning scripts and automation tools via API

Deployment Strategy

Recommended ways to host NetBox in your own environment.

docker
self-hosted
cloud