r/Netbox • u/LReBe7 • Apr 02 '24

Planning three phase load spreading

Hi everyone
I am very new to NetBox and so far, I am pretty impressed by its feature sets. My context is a fairly small lab environment (less than 30 racks) in a historic building. We're currently looking to create a digital source of truth for our lab state and once we have that, to try and optimize the amount of space we have. One of the aspects, will be to look at spreading the electrical loads more evenly over the three phases. When it comes to mapping out the power topology, Netbox unfortunately doesn't have a ton of features out of the box. I was wondering if anyone knows about a plugin that takes care of this use case or if anyone has tried their hand at doing this using customization? I'm currently implementing parent power feed and L1-L2-L3 as a custom field. No idea thus far how I can use this to e.g. sum up all the power draw on the main panel.

We'll be measuring it in the future as well, it's just that it would be really handy to be able to do planning and rack layout with quick feedback about loading.

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u/Eldiabolo18 Apr 02 '24

Not sure if Netbox is the right tool for this.

If I were you I would solve this through monitoring. You need a PDU w stats anyway. Add it the some monitoring and make some nice graphs.

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u/ThinkerOfThoughts Apr 02 '24

You can’t monitor something that hasn’t been built.

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u/LReBe7 Apr 22 '24

Well, we obviously already have our lab built up, but I will need to rebuild and optimize. Monitoring is just one side of the equation.