Feature Requests - Deep location info for a 'Corporate Mode'

[GuyManDude]

I spent a few hours getting this working yesterday and some time playing with the configuration to see how well it would fit for my use.  I like the interface a lot and it has some good functionality but it was very apparent this tool was built for an ISP or Colo and not for what is probably the largest demographic: Corporate networks.

One of the biggest problems I have with all device management tools is the lack of nested location info.  In order to be able to accurately locate a device I need to know the following set of info for example:

Country

City

Campus

Building

Floor

MDF/IDF Closet# or Room# or Cube# etc

Rack Group # 

Rack#

Rack Slot Number (you have this covered)

I would love to see you create a 'Corporate Mode' whereby the location info uses a set of nested location info like that above. 

Another feature I found problematic for corporate usage was with the Circuits/Cables functionality.  Currently one needs to input data into Point Z for a circuit but in the corporate world that is often unknown.  It would be nice to be able to create a circuit and apply IP addressing to just the Point A side.

Keep up the good work.  I'll keep an eye on the mailing list to see if these ideas are implemented and I will have a lot more useful feedback to offer if it gets to the point that I can use it.

PS. I just remembered another point of contention, there were some objects which were not tied to a location and that seemed unintuitive.

[Darcy Lange]

Hi GuyManDude,

We are mid roll out for a large corporate network. We had similar thoughts when mapping out locations but Netbox is quite flexible in how you use it.

In the end we modeled it down to the room for our larger sites / campus's. And to the building, for smaller outposts. We used the region function to show City, Site, Building, Floor, and their relationship. 

Whilst our use is not perfect, it seems to be working well so far. 

Regards,
Darcy

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[David Gomes]

I think pretty much everything there is covered in some way or other.

Country/city/campus and probably building can be taken care of by using sites. You can either use the address fields for a site or create custom fields to specify city/country.

Campus buildings can be tied to a "region" (field whose values you can define) so you could create a region called "Campus A" and tie sites to it. Regions can also be nested, so if you wanted to you could also do "Country A"/"Campus A" and "Country A"/"Campus B".

You would then create a site for each building in each campus.

Room number and all those other details can be taken care of one of two ways:

1) custom fields created for racks, where you could populate this information when creating racks in the system

2) naming convention

We used a naming convention even before adopting netbox that allowed us to do pretty much all of this. It looks like this:

HD-01-05-XXYY-U42-DEV0009

where HD = the building ID code, 01 = floor number, 05 = zone (equivalent to a room for us) XXYY = X,Y coordinates on the floor layout grid (rack mounted items share same XXYY as parent rack), U42 = rack position, 00 if non-rackable, DEV0009 = 3 letter code for device type and unique identifier number.

I agree for circuits it's kind of weird, we just created a dummy device the circuits terminate to that "belongs" to the ISP, it's a non-racked generic device with network ports associated to a site that either has the ISP's business address or if we know the physical location of the termination point we put that address.