As network teams face the ongoing battle to solve the challenge of keeping operational infrastructure in line with intended configurations, open-source network and infrastructure management platform provider NetBox Labs has announced the general availability of the NetBox Assurance service, designed to enable IT teams to maintain accurate documentation and understanding of their network operations.
In essence, Assurance detects operational drift, the differences between the intended network state that is documented by specifications and the operational network state that is actually running in the network.
NetBox Labs said finding and resolving operational drift is a “game-changer” for IT teams relying on accurate documentation as the foundation for network and infrastructure automation, compliance, security and operational excellence.
“With NetBox Assurance, we’ve addressed one of the most persistent challenges in network operations – the gap between what you think your network looks like and what it actually looks like,” said Richard Boucher, senior product manager at NetBox Labs, explaining the basic aim of the solution. “By closing this gap, we’re enabling network teams to operate with greater confidence, security and control.”
Using NetBox Assurance, teams are said to be able to accelerate automation, reduce time to resolve network performance issues and speed operations. The offering supports multiple use cases across the network lifecycle.
In a typical scenario, NetBox said that in initial parts of deployment, teams can populate an empty NetBox instance while maintaining full control over data quality and, subsequently, less than a day later, they can enter a phase of network management maturity so they can continuously improve their documentation processes by identifying areas needing attention, accelerating transformation and automation initiatives.
By day two, NetBox said teams can have operational control to detect and remediate drift immediately, minimising downtime risk, accelerating issue resolution and reducing the infrastructure attack surface.
The Assurance offering is built on the foundation of Diode, a source-available project from NetBox Labs that offers a subset of Assurance functionality. Both products share a common application programming interface for data ingestion through the Diode SDK, which provides an alternative interface for sending data to NetBox with built-in idempotence, automatic ordering and other capabilities that simplify the development of integrations.
It also works in conjunction with NetBox Discovery, which includes observability capabilities for network discovery, device discovery and a list of controller discovery integrations with platforms like VMware vCenter, Juniper Mist, Cisco Catalyst Center, Microsoft DHCP and Amazon Web Services VPC IPAM. These integrations are attributed with helping to pull the latest information from the network for processing in Assurance.
“Since our [initial launch] announcement at AutoCon2 in November 2024, we’ve seen massive demand for NetBox Assurance,” said Kris Beevers, CEO of NetBox Labs. “The enthusiastic participation in our private preview has validated our vision: network teams need powerful, accessible tools to manage and observe their network, maintain accurate documentation and remain in control of their network configurations.”
NetBox Assurance is now available for customers to demo and purchase as an optional add-on for both NetBox Cloud and NetBox Enterprise, with tiered pricing based on the volume of ingested entities per month.
A NetBox Discovery observability agent is included with NetBox Assurance, while agent extensions are available in standard and premium bundles for professional and enterprise tiers.
In addition to software as a service and self-managed versions of enterprise-grade NetBox, the company offers air-gapped installations, NetBox Discovery, and a growing suite of artificial intelligence (AI) features that enable AI-driven network and infrastructure management.