scope of the project - required features

[luis gonzalez]

Dear colleagues, 

Right now, our team is trying to analyze different tools to manage our Data Center. Reading your documentation, I found out that some features won't take into consideration because are out of the scope of the project. Although is more complicated than that, these are some of the required features we need for our DCIM. Before to decide anything and start to collaborate, I would like to verify if some of these features are out of the scope of the project. If we decided to go for your solution, we will be 3-4 people developing code.

Required features

• Power monitoring (including historical data): socket, phase, PDU, rack, POD, UPS, ROOM, SITE, SITES-WIDE
• Asset inventory and management (including lifecycle)
• Capacity planning
• Rack/Room layout views/visualization
• Power sockets / PDU - system mappings
• Network sockets / systems mappings
• API for interoperability with existing tools in-house

Have a nice day and thank you for your help.

Luis

[Brian Candler]

On Monday, 24 June 2019 14:07:21 UTC+1, luis gonzalez wrote:

• Power monitoring (including historical data): socket, phase, PDU, rack, POD, UPS, ROOM, SITE, SITES-WIDE

Netbox doesn't do *any* monitoring.  But you can use it to configure your monitoring system, e.g. using context data or custom fields - and you can link to graphs in your external NMS or create custom links to other systems (the latter is a 2.6 feature)

 

• Asset inventory and management (including lifecycle)

Netbox is not an asset management system.  I can record that a particular Device exists in a particular location right now, and its status (e.g. planned/active etc), but it doesn't have the purchase history, and it doesn't have the concept of spares.

In particular, things like line cards in a device are modelled as Inventory Items, but it's impossible to have inventory items which exist outside of a device, not even to move them (you have to delete the item from device A and recreate in device B). So you would be better off with a separate asset system for keeping track of that sort of asset.

 

• Capacity planning

That's a bit of a catch-all requirement.  It can tell you the space utilization in each rack, and you can reserve space in a rack.  It also reports on IP prefix utilisation.

 

• Rack/Room layout views/visualization

There is a basic "rack elevations" view, showing the front and rear of each rack.  It shows only items which fit in 1U positions in the rack (e.g. items on shelves are not shown).  There is no room layout display.

 

• Power sockets / PDU - system mappings

Yes: a device can have power ports (power inlets), which you connect to power outlets on some other device (e.g. PDU).  Netbox 2.6 also has power panels, which are the datacentre-level power feeds.

• Network sockets / systems mappings

Yes: devices can have interfaces (active ports), or front ports / rear ports (passive pass-through ports, e.g. patch panels).  The end-to-end path through patch panels can be traced.

The most severe limitation here IMO is that an "interface" is only a single connection; you cannot model an SFP in an interface, and you cannot model an interface with separate fibres for transmit and receive.  If all your fibres are duplex then you can just consider a fibre pair as a single connection.

• API for interoperability with existing tools in-house

Netbox exposes a fairly traditional HTTP/REST API, and it can also call out to external services on data changes via webhooks.  Whether that's compatible with your existing in-house tools, only you can judge.