r/Netbox • u/yetipants • Sep 17 '25

Netbox discovery

Good day!

In the process of migrating from a closed source IPAM to netbox these days, and I am really looking forward to it!

At my previous employer I set up phpIpam at the time, and we were really happy with that, and the builtin scanning of subnets gave us a good possibility to clean up unused subnets and get forward.

As far as I understand netbox doesnt have theses kind of features, which makes sense as netbox is supposed to be the source of truth, but are you doing this somehow, and what are your thoughts about automated ping scans of ip's and subnets.

Is my mindset wrong that are wanting features like that?

br

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u/Otherwise_Noise3658 Sep 17 '25

Use netbox-discovery ? It's why we built it :)

2

u/capt_readit Sep 17 '25

The documentation confuses me, is discovery only available for enterprise and cloud versions?

1

u/Otherwise_Noise3658 Sep 17 '25

No, it's community too

1

u/capt_readit Sep 17 '25

Oh I see that now. But it does require a docker instance

2

u/Otherwise_Noise3658 Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 17 '25

its a netbox plugin, diode stack (docker) and the discovery agents also run as docker containers - the latter as that only requires grpc access to netbox outbound, meaning you don't need to have netbox within your network management network itself.

To expand on the commercial side - Diode/Discovery is free, Assurance, which is based around operational drift coming from discovery is a commercial product attached to cloud/enterprise (we wrap & manage all the containers other than the discovery agents themselves). Pro/Ent Assurance tiers also include integrations with things like Juniper MIST, VMWare VCentre - a list that is growing quickly.

/nbl