Nautobot 3.2: Enterprise Reporting, Job Chaining, and a Richer Data Model

Enterprise network teams rarely have trouble automating a task once. The difficulty comes in seeing the whole network accurately, running the same change safely across thousands of devices, and then proving to everyone else in the business that it worked.

Nautobot 3.2 is now generally available, and there’s a wealth of new functionality designed to allow users to gain enhanced network visibility and more efficiently automate their infrastructure at scale. The team did a great job ensuring an on-time quality release, and it shows. This release addresses all three of those problems, and it contains new applications, updated Nautobot Core functionality, and improvements to existing components, spanning the open source Community edition through Nautobot Professional, Nautobot Enterprise, and Nautobot Cloud.

Nautobot Core: Faster Search and Richer Data Models

The heart of everything we build with Nautobot is the open-source Nautobot Core, and part of the ongoing journey with the solution is updating and improving the user interface and overall user experience. Nautobot Search was introduced in 3.0, and further enhanced in 3.1, and that continues in 3.2 with the ability to autocomplete searches. Via a modern “typeahead” feature, users can enter keywords (such as “Devices” or “Locations”), and the system will automatically fill in the keyword for easier searching. On top of that, when the user enters text, the system will immediately search for results and preview them to the user, to reduce the overhead needed for searching.

We’ve also extended the existing Data Models within Nautobot Core, adding support for both Breakout Cables and IP Ranges. Historically, users could create simple point-to-point cables (that is, with a single A side and a single B side). Now, however, users can model cable types and build more complex cables, such as 1-by-4 Breakout Cables (e.g., for a 100G to 4x25G breakout). This was one of the most highly requested features from customers, as it is a common use case in data center modeling, and it was one of the capabilities shared with the community during the product feedback session at NautoCon Munich. In keeping with the focus on UX, users can view both tabular and graphical views of cable connectivity, and run a cable trace through the breakout down to the interface level. Moreover, users can now manage cables as independent assets within Nautobot, as they can detach cables from interfaces without deleting the cable itself.

The IP Range modeling extends our existing IPAM functionality by allowing users to create full ranges within the system, for use cases such as DHCP scoping, NAT pooling, or firewall zone creation. These ranges can automatically generate exclusion zones to ensure address assignment does not pull from them, and they can also be registered as fully utilized, which lets administrators quickly analyze usage within individual prefixes.

Finally, Nautobot is highly customizable through Nautobot Jobs, and we’ve enabled more control for day-to-day management of these jobs via the Job Termination feature. Power users can now cancel jobs while they are running, remove jobs that have stalled (in case, for example, the worker thread has died), and cancel scheduled jobs before they execute. This matters most in production, where clearing a stalled job previously meant intervening on the worker itself rather than managing Jobs from within Nautobot.

Nautobot Commercial Applications: Job Chaining, Reports, and Expanded Automation Apps

Nautobot’s commercial offerings build on top of Nautobot Core itself; we’ve released new applications and added additional functionality to existing ones. This is for both the Professional and Enterprise offerings, which were introduced earlier this year in the Nautobot 3.1 release.

One new offering, Job Chaining, available in Nautobot Professional and above, allows developers to string together Nautobot Jobs in order to generate complex, multi-step workflows, and even supports recursion so a chain can itself call another chain. Chaining is paired with enhanced Job Results visualizations, so that a multi-step workflow can be reviewed as a single sequence with its inputs and outputs intact, rather than as a set of unrelated job runs that an operator has to reassemble by timestamp.

Nautobot Reports (Nautobot Enterprise)

Based on extensive customer conversations, we wanted to take advantage of the wealth of data available within Nautobot’s Source of Truth and allow users to easily analyze and share that data. To that end, we’ve introduced Nautobot Reports, a fully fledged application enabling users to create professional, presentation-ready documentation from live data, available as part of Nautobot Enterprise.

Administrators can design their reports in great detail, using fully customizable drag-and-drop layouts and embedding data directly from Nautobot’s source of truth. In addition, advanced users can customize and personalize their reports with Jinja templates for data manipulation and predefined rich text blocks. This enables its use not only for internal teams, but also allows publication to colleagues who are not using Nautobot daily, ensuring that they’re up-to-date on the specifics of the inventory, or configuration, or lifecycle. A quarterly hardware lifecycle summary for a budget conversation, or an audit pack showing every device that passed a compliance check last month, are both a saved layout and a schedule rather than an afternoon of exporting and formatting. With the ability to schedule distribution via email or export directly out of the system, administrators can ensure that everyone is kept informed.

Device Discovery, OS Upgrades, and Operational Compliance

Building on the previous release, we’ve also extended the functionality of the Device Discovery, OS Upgrades, and Operational Compliance apps. Device Discovery can now automatically classify devices into roles, locations, and tenants, based upon user-defined rules. For example, an admin may know that text within a hostname indicates the device’s location, so a device arriving as lon-dc1-leaf01 can be assigned to the London site, the data center role, and the correct tenant at the moment it is discovered; this can be automatically extracted and used to classify the device, which removes the manual triage step that usually follows a discovery run.

For OS Upgrades, we’ve added additional device support, extending Cisco IOS-XR via the Golden ISO option, adding support for Juniper Junos OS clusters (EX Series Virtual Chassis), and simplifying the workflow for Cisco IOS-XE support. OS Upgrades can also run an automatic pre- and post-upgrade OS check, and will skip the upgrade entirely if the device is already running the target version, which returns a maintenance window that would otherwise have been spent on a no-op.

In Operational Compliance, we’ve extended Validation Rules to Dynamic Groups, which gives more granular control over command execution and allows execution to be targeted at specific devices, and we’ve added a Compare to Latest Snapshot feature to accelerate analysis. There’s also now Offline Command Outputs: this optional feature lets users pull data from a repository, instead of connecting to a live device. This will be of most use to customers with highly secure segregated (air-gapped) networks or those with highly distributed branch environments who cannot guarantee Nautobot access to a running system.

Nautobot Cloud: Custom Self-Service and a Dedicated Production Backend

Nautobot Cloud, our fully managed PaaS / SaaS solution, adds two additional features. Users have always been able to customize their Nautobot solution via Jobs and apps, and have been able to run these in Nautobot Cloud as well. However, previously there were manual steps required in order to get the solution running: this required a request to our Support organization, who would gather the requisite files and build the custom Nautobot image on the customer’s behalf. Using the new Custom Nautobot Self-Service feature, administrators can now quickly ensure that their Nautobot instance running in the cloud solution is as customized as they would like; they can upload, install, and upgrade custom Nautobot apps. In addition, it supports uploading logo or branding assets and static files, all to ensure a completely customized cloud deployment.

We’ve also improved the underlying architecture of Nautobot Cloud itself with a new Dedicated Production Backend, which allows users to explicitly specify whether a Nautobot instance is Production or non-Production, thereby differentiating between their multiple Nautobot instances to ensure maximum uptime and SLA responsiveness for the Production solution. Now users can actively develop or test their non-Production (e.g., Development or UAT) environments and rest easy that this work will have no impact on their Production solution.

Getting Started with Nautobot 3.2

The team is excited for users to download and implement the new Nautobot 3.2 solution. Nautobot 3.2 continues to extend the leading network automation platform by improving source-of-truth capabilities, reducing manual data entry, and providing granular control over automated orchestration. For teams upgrading from 3.1, the release notes at docs.nautobot.com cover the migration considerations in full, and as with 3.1 we have kept model and back-end changes deliberately contained.

Ready to see it in action? Explore everything in the release on the Nautobot Release Hub, read the full release notes on docs.nautobot.com, register for the Nautobot 3.2 webinar where we will demonstrate the new functionality end to end, or book a demo with our team. And if there is something you need that is not here yet, the Nautobot Slack community is where a good number of the features above started, including several that the community ranked for us at NautoCon Munich.