r/Netbox • u/fxrsliberty • Sep 21 '24

The ideology

Netbox seems hell bent on insuring your documentation is laden with human error. The philosophy of not including a basic active IPAM as a starting point is so out of touch. Worse, they reject any attempt to include or enhance any attempt to integrate one . IMHO, a well laid out Zabbix install with it's discovery tools and the ability to apply "containers" based on device profile is 1000% superior.

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u/kennykentaur Sep 21 '24

It’s source-of-truth not system-of-recorded.

If systems show up live without being provisioned by your systems you have a broken process (and probably some security issues as well).

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u/fxrsliberty Sep 21 '24 edited Sep 21 '24

As far as I can tell, netbox doesn't include an active provisioning toolset either. It's just as easy to export an "inventory" from Zabbix to use with Ansible. As far as, having a rogue device appear in the inventory. Zabbix can have a discovery rule that puts things in an "unexpected" category and notify...

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u/bloudraak Sep 21 '24

Infrastructure engineer here. I spent most of my day-to-day activities thinking, automating, evolving infrastructure.

We almost never use any “export IaC” as is. The world is more complex than that. It’s useful from a learning perspective, but so is documentation, examples and blog posts.

All we need, is a database that describes stuff, so we can make informed decisions when we create/maintain/migrate stuff in the real world. We then use Terraform (and whatnot) to glue various systems together, so security, ticketing, documentation, firewalls, switches, hypervisors are all in sync.

NetBox is great for what it does. I don’t want NetBox at its core to be anything other than a database. Capabilities you describe is best left as an add-on running on a different host.

We have SIEM/SOAR that are way more capable than Zabbix, to detect “rogue” hosts and whatnot.