NetBox began in 2016 as an open-source tool for keeping a record of what is on a network. In the modern AI era, understanding what’s on the network is more complicated and necessary than ever before.
NetBox Labs today announced new capabilities for its Infrastructure Intelligence Platform at NetBox Evolve, its first conference, held at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The company also announced partnerships with Nvidia and Grafana Labs. Nvidia now integrates with NetBox as a native source of truth for Nvidia Configuration Manager, the network orchestration component of Nvidia DSX OS. Grafana Labs and NetBox Labs released an official NetBox plugin in the Grafana catalog.
NetBox Labs is the commercial steward of NetBox, which the company says is used by more than 10,000 organizations. The company was spun out of DNS platform provider NS1 after IBM acquired NS1 in 2023. It launched the Infrastructure Intelligence Platform in June to cover the full infrastructure lifecycle.
The new capabilities include:
- NetBox Designs: A template system for infrastructure design. A team defines a site, rack or IP plan once. NetBox then renders it down to component configuration.
- NetBox Analytics: A set of ready-made dashboards for common infrastructure questions.
- NetBox Agents: Pre-built agents for change request review, lifecycle and version compliance, data quality management, and data import.
- NetBox Platform MCP Server: A fully managed server that connects customer agents to NetBox.
“What we’ve always known is that Netbox is a context layer for agents and infrastructure,” Kris Beevers, CEO of NetBox Labs, told Network World.
The Infrastructure Intelligence Platform expands across the lifecycle
NetBox Labs introduced the Infrastructure Intelligence Platform in June. Beevers described it as a cohesive stack for teams that manage complex, long-running infrastructure. The platform sits on NetBox, which holds the data about devices and how they connect.
The platform is now being expanded along what Beevers called the lifecycle axis. The earliest stage is design, before any hardware is bought. NetBox Designs addresses that stage with reusable templates. Further along, new products help teams understand what is happening in their environments. Beevers said teams can ask questions such as what is going into support soon or how much port capacity or power draw is left.
The second focus is agents. NetBox Labs is making it easier to connect agents to infrastructure data and context. The fully managed NetBox Platform MCP Server lets teams bring that context to their own agents. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. NetBox Labs also runs agents of its own through NetBox Agents, an orchestration platform. The new pre-built agents cover change request review, lifecycle and version compliance, data quality management, and data import.
Controls surround those agents. They are read-only by default. Changes start in the NetBox intent model, run on a branch, and go through architect review. NetBox Validation tests each proposed change against compliance and operational rules and sends feedback to the agent.
“This is infrastructure, and so if an agent does the wrong thing, it breaks the company,” Beevers said.
NetBox Designs turns repeatable infrastructure into templates
AI data centers are full of racks that are almost all identical in design. Teams do not want to lay out each one by hand. The same applies to a retail chain with small, medium, and large store formats, where the IT footprint needs to line up. NetBox Designs, now in public preview, targets that repetition.
Designs work like “templatized Lego bricks for infrastructure,” Beevers said. A team defines a site, rack or IP plan once and sets its parameters. NetBox then renders the plan as many times as needed, down to the low-level components and their configuration. That includes assigning IP addresses, prefixes, and virtual LANs across a fabric. The goal is to speed design down to the component level, reduce manual error and compress time to market.
The workflow continues past design. NetBox Asset Lifecycle carries the planned objects through bill of materials, purchase order, shipment, and installation.
Teams can also work with Designs through agents. The approach resembles prompting a coding assistant. An engineer can ask an agent to swap an Arista switch for a Cisco switch in a rack. The agent uses Designs and the NetBox data set of infrastructure components to make the change.
“I do anticipate that teams are going to work that way with their infrastructure design,” Beevers said.
Enterprises need to rationalize decades of tool sprawl
Most of the world’s infrastructure is not AI data center infrastructure. It is enterprise infrastructure at organizations such as banks and retailers. Beevers called the state of these environments sprawl. They hold 20 to 30 years of technology decisions and tool adoption, layered on top of each other.
AI is now adding workload to those networks. Rising vulnerability rates add pressure as well. Teams need to drive a high rate of change, patch to stay secure, and scale effectively. The same pressures that created the need for automation over the years are compounding faster. As a result, “they’ve got to rationalize their stacks for managing all this stuff pretty fast,” Beevers said.
NetBox Labs plans to keep adding to the platform. Infrastructure is complex enough that the company expects to partner with others, with more partnerships coming in the next few months. The company also remains an open-source business at its core. Its mission has not changed.
“Our mission is to make it easier to build, manage complex networks and infrastructure, full stop,” Beevers said.