Netbox: Organizing the Chaos, Automating the Mundane

This talk covers how NCSA has been using NetBox to document and manage our datacenter infrastructure. I’ll cover how we use it for rack, cable, and power documentation, hardware inventory, and tracking purchase and warranty information.
I’ll also walk through how using NetBox as our source of truth enabled us to build out an automation system using Ansible and GitLab — covering config management, network and server backups, and warranty alerting.
I’ll also touch on how NetBox’s extensibility allows you to run custom scripts for additional automation tasks. Including the ability to install plugins for additional functionality and how NCSA has utilized some of those plugins.