Nautobot 2.4

hey and welcome to the webinar for today uh so excited to see so many of you joining in uh we saw a lot of you out there in the waiting room just a few minutes ago so that’s amazing uh we’re just going to wait about 1 minute while we wait for everyone to get in from the waiting room or those that may be uh joining in here as we are uh just getting started so just hang out hang tight for a second here we will get started here just shortly I’m just going to wait one minute while we wait for everyone to fill in we don’t want anyone to miss out on this

really cool update that we’ve got coming for you uh as we go through it today so amazing to see all of you filtering in thank you so much glad to see you all coming in from all over the world uh looking forward to a great webinar today with some of our uh our hosts here from NTC and uh we will wait just about one minute for those of you still joining in don’t don’t worry we will get started here shortly as we wait for everyone to fill up all right definitely see some folks still coming in but I think we have a pretty good amount of folks in here uh

thank you so much uh love seeing all of the great attendees uh from everywhere all over the world here joining us today amazing uh we’re going to go ahead and get started today we’re going through our announcement of the Nautobot ecosystem our Mega release uh the uh the richest feature set and most powerful applications to date coming to you from Network to code today presenting I’ll be myself uh Tim Schreyack here hosting the event uh and with me will be John Anderson and Christian seru we going through all of our uh sessions here as we go through

today uh we are going to talk about the core improvements coming into Nautobot 2.4 as I mentioned while it’s not a major release technically it is really a mega release with so many great new updates uh we’ll also talk about the Nautobot app ecosystem some new and improved apps there and the sneak peek at perhaps what’s coming uh in the very near future of course Q&A uh please do use the Q&A box uh we prefer that so that way we can make sure that we can share your questions and get them answered with everyone here in the group uh as well as don’t forget

you have the ability to react here um it is down under the controls uh if like something we’re talking about please give us a thumbs up or a hard Emoji or whatever we love the reactions so that way we know we’re we’re keying in on things that are of interest to you um and then of course we’ll close out with some summary at the end uh so just a quick summary for those maybe that may be joining and aren’t familiar with Nautobot already just a quick idea about what it is it is built and uh intended for Enterprise class and Enterprise grade applications uh

at its core it’s a network source of Truth uh but one of the things that we have found over time is that we need to not only be able to document things but we need to actually be able to use that data to drive change to actually Empower our organizations and that’s where the automation platform that’s a key component of our Nautobot platform comes into play uh it is absolutely extensible and usable within your environment whether that’s via the graphql endpoint web hooks Integrations with G or GitHub and of course the rest API so an incredibly powerful

platform intended for driving your business bu forward uh with that we’re going to move into our coure improvements here this is going to be Nautobot 2.4 uh and I’m going to hand off to John Anderson who will take this next section all right thanks Tim very excited to be back with everyone um just to mention Nautobot 2.4 is a huge release for us um but it is still a minor release so just want to point out you know everything that you see here still is you know fully backwards compatible for folks that are looking to upgrade and things like that uh you

know as Tim mentioned we are uh always striving to build Enterprise you know gr software so our commitment towards you know safe upgrades and so forth uh is very evident in this release but we’re going to kick it off here the first thing I’d love to talk about is this event publication framework and this is targeting uh event-driven automation needs uh from our larger Enterprise customers so what this is all about is we now have an event subsystem within Nautobot that takes uh interesting events that are happening in the system so when you’re modifying

data when new devices are getting created when you’re updating IP addresses uh you know moving vlans around and things like that right uh but also job events so when you kick off a job or job succeeds or job fails for whatever reason uh those are now all types of events that we can trigger uh notifications through configurable event Brokers out into an automated ecosystem of subscribers to those event buses so this is a very typical type of uh event bus architecture that you’d find in larger Enterprises uh you know or organizations that are really

looking for more realtime processing of uh automated infrastructure and data and so forth so Nautobot now has uh some real first class citizen uh feature sets here and what we provide out of the box in release 2.4 are built-in event broker connectors for uh redis and um we have a assist example and uh we’re working on some Kafka support as well so what we also provide is the base and the documentation for you to be able to build your own event Brokers as you see fit in your environment um maybe something that’s custom in-house or you know another open

source product or something like that you can very easily integrate this feature set and of course it’s all configurable so you can uh you know have full control over the types of events that you care about that are happening within Nautobot how they get uh published into those different event Brokers you can have different event Brokers uh configured to different event types and so forth right but the possibilities from an automation perspective are really exciting here um you know integrating these with Downstream systems you know maybe uh we’ve got a

service now connector that’s hooked up to this event bus that’s reacting in real time to events that are going on within Nautobot now um you know or maybe we’re modifying our Downstream uh network monitoring and Management Systems you know modifying alerts and Splunk and so forth right so we’re really excited to see uh where you all are able to take this uh feature set in the future uh we really think you know this uh definitely ties into Nautobot’s desire to not only combine the network source of Truth with automation but really the Integrations

throughout the ecosystem so not only within our platform but how you can integrate it within the rest of your ecosystem right thanks Tim we can move on from here yeah so the next thing uh we’ve got several network data models that are new uh within the system so the first is our Enterprise wireless data model set so this is uh targeting Enterprise deployments of wireless access uh configurations right so if you think uh you know Aruba or Cisco Wireless or how moroi does deployments um so controller based architectures you know is primarily what this is

targeting but it does also support uh you know certain controller lists Wireless deployment options but uh really what this is about is our uh recognition of how people expect to manage this from a network source of Truth standpoint right we really want to model how uh Wireless Enterprise deployments work in the real world especially how the vendors are actually doing it right we obviously take a vendor neutral approach in the data model you know we’re not tied to any of the vendors uh either displayed on the screen here or that exist otherwise within

the ecosystem but we kind of find the commonalities between them from a data modeling standpoint so that you can model things like your uh radio profiles and your SSID your SSID profiles and how those actually get configured how groups of access points are deployed realistically in you know multi- geographical types of environments where you’ve got maybe Branch sites and you’ve got different access point groups and uh you know different configurations for different VLAN and things like that right so you can see some examples of the different uh you know

Common Wireless architectures that uh this data model definitely supports you know Central versus standalone controller architectures you know mesh versus Bridges connectivity in terms of how we get that traffic back out of the controller and so forth right so this uh Builds on the existing controller data model that we’ve uh supported within Nautobot for some time now for non-wireless types of deployment so things like sdn controllers and so forth right and this adds the wireless specific data modeling components to it so we go to the the next side Tim

yeah so as far as you know what this data model uh does comprise as I mentioned you know it’s tracking the wireless network profiles so your SSID configuration and how those relate to the groups of access points that those ssids would be uh configured within the network you know so we don’t have the we don’t have to worry about the granularity of saying you know I’ve got 10,000 access point points in my Enterprise and I need to you know configure this SSID on every single one of them right we can group those in meaningful ways and what we call Managed

uh a controller managed device groups and then those device groups obviously can relate to locations they can be hierarchical in nature and they relate ultimately back to the controllers that have purview over those devices so that’s how we manage the the access point groupings and then we apply the wireless network and radio profiles to those uh device groups and so forth right so again really it’s you know our recognition that we want our solution to be very Enterprise friendly very Enterprise first and you can obviously see how this data model is

going to be very Prime for uh ssot Integrations within our ecosystem to actually apply this configuration to the controllers or read the configuration back into Nautobot to give you that uh you know first pane of glass for from a network Automation and data standpoint all right next up is virtual device contexts so this is all about a logical slicing of devices right different vendors have different names for this type of Technology you know Cisco does actually call it you know like Nexus virtual device context junip I leave is logical systems Arista

multi-instance EOS for instance and and so on but what this uh you know fundamentally is about in the networking world is taking a physical piece of hardware and logically slicing it into virtual uh sets of resources that we would typically use in like a multi-tenant type environment where you know we want um you know this set of interfaces on this device and it’s you know Associated vrf configuration to be logically separated from other customers that might exist on that physical device right uh so in our data model know we do a lot of specific things

and again this is entirely vendor neutral uh you know we can support not only the the the names and logos that you see on the right there but but you know we we do feel that we can support you know pretty much any uh vendor construct that plays in this same domain of logically separating uh you know different customers different logical intents within a physical device so as you can imagine excuse me you imagine you know this uh virtual device contexts obviously relat to the device that they’re on but some interesting things that you can do you know is

uh you know obviously associating the different interfaces from the parent device that would be Associated to the different vdcs and we do support the cases where interfaces might belong to multiple vdcs some vendors do support that um and that’s a good example of how we can use our extensibility feature set within Nautobot to maybe put a constraint on that where if that’s not realistic in our environment we can still enforce that hey we don’t want interfaces to span multiple vdcs so that’s a great example of you know how we can combine feature sets

within Nautobot to kind of suit our specific data model in needs another great example of that is how we might use virtual device contexts in concert with other features like uh chassis modules where maybe we have a larger piece of Hardware that is a chassis based system with different line cards and so forth um that represents the physical entity of that device right we can model those relationships with um chassis modules and then we can use virtual device contacts on top of that because we have logically sliced that device for different purposes a

good examp example of that might be how some of the larger F5 boxes work for instance so again it’s kind of how we can pick and choose the different data modeling features that Nautobot provides to suit our organization’s you know specific networking needs here next up is a really cool new feature uh the Ginga template rendering tool that is now built directly into Nautobot so uh a lot of our users use an app called Golden config and you’ll hear from from um my colleague here a little bit later about uh some new capabilities there but golden config is

uh core endent of it is using Ginger templating to build actual device intended configuration and then obviously dealing with the remediation and config drift aspects of that one of the big things that comes from a network automation standpoint when we’re doing that is the fact that we have to build these templates we have to manage them so what this tool allows us to do is have a really quick interface that is local to our organization so there are obviously tools like this that you may be aware of that are out on the internet and so forth right um we

wouldn’t want to put our organization’s data out on the internet you know for for that purpose so having this feature set directly in Nautobot is a really awesome way uh to quickly build and iterate on these templates as we go you know so as you can see obviously you’ve got the ability to modify your template on the Fly here and then you can paste in the data that you want that would be passed to this template and this is the base level functionality right so this is kind of like the general purpose I want to you know play with a template or develop it

a little bit uh more you’ll see later on in the webinar how we’ve uh do have a feature specific to Golden config that takes this you know 10 steps further where it’s actually integrating data within Nautobot to make that golden config set of use cases uh even more easier to adopt all right and there’s so much more in the Nautobot 2.4 core release itself uh too much to be able to go into in a webinar here today uh these are some of the other highlights um there’s even more in the release notes right if you were to check it out then we can even put in

this slide alone there’s a couple that I will call out here that are quite interesting so the first one here is the UI component framework this is a developer uh uh uh uh focused feature so if you are building Nautobot apps within your organization and your environment this is going to be very uh key to you and understanding as we go forward with the evolution of the Nautobot app ecosystem and the apis that we provide there what we’ve built here in this UI component framework is a set of abstractions that uh get away from all of the boilerplate that is

writing HTML templates and ultimately building uh frontend UI uh code so basically we want you to be able to focus on the network data models that got you into a place where you want to build a Nautobot app in the first place and the automation business logic that’s tied to those models let’s focus on that and remove the need to have to deal with the development complexities and the Annoying maintenance overhead of just the UI codebase itself right so this UI component framework is a python based API that integrates with what we call the Nautobot UI

view set very well so that we can very easily in just a couple lines of python code describe how we want to display data within the UI and this also forces standardization in the look and feel in the application and you know selfishly from our our standpoint what it uh also allows is some upgrade protection right so we want to be able to to make some further Evolution within the tools and technology and the look and feel of the application from a UI and Guy perspective and the way that we’ll be able to do that and protect not only our own ecosystem but

you in the apps that that you’re building within your organization from an upgrade durability standpoint is if we can get everyone to migrate over to this UI component framework we can change how the front end is rendered and uh you don’t have to make any updates to your code right you don’t have to deal with you know moving HTML you know source code around and stuff like that right so really powerful development feature set there um another one here is we have a lot of customers that have deployed Nautobot in a kubernetes environment and one of the

things that we often hear about uh is the fact that the job execution framework which is based on an open source project called celery which is basically the uh Powerhouse for how job actually get executed um that architecturally is not a very Cloud native solution and kubernetes obviously being container based we want to build um you know kind of cloud native or at least Cloud friendly types of software architectures so what we offer in this is a deeper integration within the kubernetes environment to execute jobs without the use of celery so we can

actually get rid of the celery based infrastructure these kind of really big fat pods that exist in kubernetes can get rid of those all together and we can execute our jobs directly on kubernetes as they are kubernetes jobs so they’re ephemeral containers that spin up um if you didn’t follow any of that at all don’t worry what it amounts to is a more Cloud native way of actually deploying Nautobot in a kubernetes based environment um and then I’ll call out two other things here that are performance related uh so for folks that are interested in uh you

know operating Nautobot at higher and higher scales we’ve made a couple of enhancements in our rest API uh in specific spefic cases where larger responses uh related to certain relations within the data model you know have some more flexibility uh with some options to exclude certain relations and Fields so that can improve the the rest API performance in that regard and then the second is when dealing with bulk actions in the uh web interface so when you want to select a bunch of devices and uh bulk edit them to apply you know a new status or something

like that or you want to delete a bunch of data in bulk um we now process those as background jobs so they’re what we call system jobs in the in in Nautobot now so we run them asynchronously effectively right and then we’ll we’ll notify you when those are completed in the in the case of uh like ex Import and Export that we’ve done in the past you know you obviously have the ability to then download that file when it’s complete so this is kind of uh from a performance standpoint just helping us move the needle a little bit uh for folks that are dealing

with larger and larger data sets and want to deal with those bulk actions right um so again there’s a ton of content uh related to 2.4 too much to go into today but I I do hope that you know some of these updates are exciting to you and you know give you give you a good reason to to want to go and deploy a new instance of Nautobot uh or to upgrade one that you already have but with that I’ll hand it back to Tim thanks thanks John uh great opening session here for us uh hope everyone got some great uh details out of there about what’s coming in the core

updates into Nautobot 2.4 um for those of you maybe that got a little bit too deep into the weeds there as John was going into some of those details here’s the tldr right uh some amazing updates in event- driven automation that will really help power your team as you look to be able to uh take events that may be occurring on your network and then react to those uh the wireless modeling capability this is something that we’ve been asked for a lot um so here we’re finally starting to really expand this and build this out to allow you to model your uh

infrastructure L into the uh database um so great addition there in the core model and then the ginger temp templating capability coming in the UI uh also a great feature really useful for folks that may not be as technical um that want to be able to consume Nautobot and its capabilities especially as you’ll see coming up in the goldie configure application uh amazing updates there as well uh also cool you’ll just notice there one quick one that I thought was really interesting as well is the the kubernetes update for allowing to no longer require

celery uh you just kind of notice here as you see the Enterprise grade capabilities of Nautobot this is really underscoring that as well as we do uh want to empower our large scale clients and users of Nautobot that are potentially doing things like OS upgrades on thousands of devices um this is a great addition there as well to really power that and not necessarily require the use of celery in order to do that that some of the details here that John was giving us uh next up here we’re going to move now into our about an ecosystem the new and improved

apps providing some new features and improved capabilities to take us through this section is going to be Christian seru and I’ll hand over to him yeah thanks thanks team so kind of to to start it off uh we’re going to look at something that is not an app but it’s the uh presentation let’s say for our app uh our application ecosystem right um this is a page that we’ve added under the app section in Nautobot 2.4 um and here you are able to see a listing of all the apps that we have in this ecosystem uh both open source apps and those that are available

through an engagement with network to code that is under a commercial license um you’ve got information about you know kind of a description a a short blur about what the application does you’ve got links to documentation should documentation be publicly available for it um which it is for most of our our apps uh out on on docs.

robot.com and um you know for for those of you that would like to you know you see an app and you want to install it right away you even have the package name in there so you don’t even need to uh to to go anywhere else um this um Marketplace hopefully will make it easier for everyone to discover and learn more about all the um solutions that we have in uh in this uh ecosystem uh solutions that are pretty much out there uh deployed today in our customers networks they are solving real life Network automation challenges uh and they are first party uh

apps that uh Network to code has created so these are Enterprise grade applications we support them we we develop them we maintain them and we provide support for them so um this is going to be there from you know it’s a Nautobot 2.4 feature you’re going to have this in addition to the ability to you know even today you’ve got the network to code uh website you’ve got the dodo.com all of these hopefully they will uh provide more visibility into all the uh solutions that we have for uh for Network automation challenges and helping you build your uh your

environment uh next slide thank you all right so the first app updates uh they they come in for uh for the most popular app we have really uh which is the golden configuration app uh for those that are not very familiar with it this is a Nautobot app that allows uh Network operators to perform a few operations uh that relate to the managing the configuration of your network devices so you can backup uh create backups of your network device configuration you can generate configuration of your devices based on the DAT data that you have in Nautobot uh for

those devices so we call these intended configs uh and then what it also does it allows you to compare these backups to the intended configs and perform what we call compliance and Remediation that is give you kind of what’s the difference between the existing state of the network and the intended state of the network and allow you to or give you the steps required to uh get to the intended right if there’s a difference between them so the uh the feature that that that uh I’m presenting to you today uh comes in to help uh Network automation Engineers

that are developing templates and uh data or the API queries that feed that data to the to the templates really um so to to help this workflow uh for those that are feeding into this intended configuration generation feature right uh and this tool is available in the UI it allows um the template developers or automation Engineers uh to test out this feature without having to make changes to the actual uh production let’s call it production templates right um the data comes from Nautobot uh but what this allows you to do is it allows you to override

temporarily only in this UI so without any permanent changes it allows you to override the graphql query that feeds the data into the templates so let’s say you are developing that graphql query but you don’t want to break anything in the normal flow of other colleagues or operations teams that that that are already using uh the the uh golden configuration compliance features um so you can choose another graphql query for a particular device uh and this UI provides to you the um what data comes in from the API live right so you can select a gra for a

particular device you can select the graphql query and you will get that data in the right hand pane there um in addition to that you can also now as of Nautobot 2.4.2 you can override the git repository Branch so this provides to you kind of a devops style um development workflow whereby you can now create a branch on your template uh repository so you’re again the the common theme is you are able to test things out without affect ing your normal environment your regular production environment for for uh you know intended config generation and

compliance afterwards so you’re able to override the branch set a use a different branch so let’s say you have some template changes that you want to make you can now make them into a branch you push them up into your GitHub or gitlab or or bid bucket uh and then in Nautobot body will be able to use this additional Branch to render what would you know the result of the indented config look like and on the right hand side you will be able to see once you’ve selected the branch and the graphql query using the default one for either is is perfectly fine

this is all uh kind of at your fingertips here so you can see the end result uh so the configuration tab has the render template then the data uh tab has the uh API data that that was used to render it and finally if there’s a difference between this configuration and the one that is stored in the um Nautobot database then in the diff tab you will see a difference between them so that you can say okay I’m making some changes to my templates but the end result should be the same now you can validate that before doing any running any jobs across you know

all of your devices or in within a particular group um so this feature um is available today it’s released in Golden config 230 and you can also test it out in in the public sandbox that we have demo doab about.com should you you know if you’re not already um at Nautobot 2.4 you can you can try it out online uh without too much uh too much hassle um next up we’ve got the floor plan app uh this one uh is an app that uh enhances the Nautobot location and rack modeling by allowing you to create a grid representation of a data center floor plan um you know

it could be a data center Flor plan but realistically you could have a 2X two wearing closet right so uh you you define what is that grid and then on it you can indicate the placement of each rack on that floor plan so the improvements that that we are seeing here today to this app uh is that you are able to greatly customize how this uh floor plan looks like and how it is organized right so what you can do is you can uh you have different VAR a variety of different labeling and numbering systems for the X and Y AIS uh you might see here in the in the

screenshot that on um on the xaxis you’re going uh in in five uh increments of five numerically and on the y- axis you’re using letters uh but you can combine letters and numbers together um you can use Roman numerals you can use Greek letters um and even for those special cases you could use binary or hex so you’ve got a a bit of freedom in in how you’re numbering your your data center FR plan so hopefully this makes it easier to reflect what is there in in real life um now we also have a couple of additional uh tweaks here or additional features that

allow you to section off uh or to uh put a you know Mark certain tiles as to what they are doing or what status they have so you can now put a particular status or or group together a a bunch of tiles you see here in in the screenshot again you’ve got various colorizations here which relate to VAR statuses and such um and finally if you have really large floor plans you can now zoom in in and out you can press the shift key and then use your mouse wheel and you can zoom in and out while hovering above the floor plan to to help you navigate them uh a

little bit easier uh and to kind of top it off uh there is a detailed blog post over at Network too.com blog where you can find the um you know all the new features in the floor plan app uh with screenshots uh and a little bit more detail than than we can fit in today all right so the um ssot app also um has quite a few updates like this this this is pretty impressive um so the ssot framework facilitates an integration and data synchronization between various sours of Truth systems uh with kind of Nautobot acting as a as a central Clearing House for

data right this is kind of the idea so in order to achieve this we have a bunch of Integrations so think of them as ways to for Nautobot to talk to other external systems at these Integrations uh we have launched uh eight new Integrations uh with with the latest releases and that takes us to a grand total of 14 uh as you can see some of the logos here on the page uh they they are various types of systems and they will these Integrations will allow you depending again it depends on the various integration but they will allow you to get data from the

external system into Nautobot or from Nautobot to the external system or both and this uh ssot app also provides a framework uh for those more programming oriented or more having more advanced usee or maybe some other systems in house that they they want to synchronize data for from uh you are able to use this to this framework to develop your own ssot Integrations or or apps on top of it so that you can synchronize data to uh and from your your internal systems all right um next up um one of our kind of most advanced open source apps um has gotten a

lot better um the uh new enhancements added in here are around tracking the life cycle of a network design and the generated data in Nautobot um again a little bit of an intro uh for those of you that are not familiar with that what designer build design Builder does um it provides a framework uh to develop a standardized Network design which produces uh or updates a collection of objects within Nautobot so this allows you to build programmatically from a standardized design build a ton of objects in Nautobot right um and what’s new here right so this

has been around for a while and it allowed you to create a design and populate the data into Nautobot but it was kind of a fire and forget type of operation so you would generate the data the objects would be had created and that was it and now um the update to it uh really provides kind of a more complete solution around tracking the Divi the whole life cycle of this design right so it allows you to update it we you know designs really have a life cycle themselves they will evolve over time they will have different versions um the kind of new design

deployment feature which we have here uh adds a lot of features for modifying uh objects based on changes to that design and tracking all of these changes uh and making sure that you know where objects come from that would be the traceability feature uh and it allows also for bringing in you know you you might have a new site or or a new design and everything is Green Green Field is a lot easier but what if you have existing data that you want to pull into a design standard ize it and then replicate it across the board now you also are able to do this

onboarding of of your existing designs so it’s a it’s a pretty robust uh set of features uh which is which is fantastic because now you know um you have even more tools that allow you to build this kind of standardized Network design which is critical component uh in any successful Network automation strategy right so you’ve got these uh these all of these additional features uh to to to round it off um so I hope this is uh this is pretty excit exciting and uh what I would like to say also is that all the apps that uh that we’ve talked about so far uh

they are all the all the features let’s say of these apps uh they are all released and available today uh they are all open source apps and I hope this showcases Network to code’s continued commitment to open source and uh the network automation Community out there all right and finally we have um uh a network of observability app uh to talk about um and this is one of our newer apps um we also call it net OBS um obviously people are lazy you like uh you would like to to say fewer words so um I might say net OBS out of out of sheer um habit uh every now

and then so this app uh takes the um helps you take your observability stack to to to a Next Level by enriching all the metrics that come out of your Telemetry stack that that you might have you know your Prometheus uh and friends um so you enrich those metrics with source of Truth data from Nautobot um which means that again you can enhance you can build better graphs you can build better alerts uh add more detail in there that will actually be useful to those on the receiving end of those alerts for example that have to fix the network or or figure

out what’s what’s going wrong um so um it is a lot of about enriching the these metrics so for example um let’s say you have metrics about an interface right that interface is a circuit that is connected to some service provider and now when you’re when you’re sending those metrics to your Telemetry platform you can also enrich them by having additional data from Nautobot such as you know who’s the provider of that circuit let’s say AT&T who’s you know what’s the circuit ID uh what is its status um let’s say active right and what is what is the role of

that circuit uh it’s appearing circuit to to uh maybe let’s say an i or uh or to a service Upstream service provider and with all of this data uh you can now um have a little bit more detail when it matters so let’s say uh when when you were looking at graphs for for all sorts of you know let’s say bandwidth utilization for all the routers in a particular region that terminate certain circuits from certain providers you have that data already in your observability and Telemetry system right so you don’t need to to to start to correlate manually things

because all of that data is already provided as enrich metrics uh in there um and this also happens to to to help out with alerts because you have more context and and that is very important so let’s say an interface goes down um I would like to know you know what I I know what device it is but now I can also know what the role is of that device maybe it’s a peing router maybe it’s not right so I can I can figure out uh what’s going on and also is the status active or not maybe an alert on an interface that goes down on an on a on a a router that’s

under provisioning doesn’t really matter right but if it’s an active uh in production device then it actually matters so uh this is kind of the uh the netops app um in a nutshell right um and it is available today on Nautobot cloud uh or through a formal Services uh engagement with network to code um so if you are curious to get in touch um that is all I have have for you today so Tim over over to you thanks Christian uh great summary of the updates that we have coming into some of our applications here in the 2.4 release um for those of you that may be

looking for the tldr here we go uh so first golden config right our number one most popular app uh it is what empowers the idea of configuration compliance within the Nautobot ecosystem it also enables you and your teams to be able to potenti ually um start down the path of net devops or how do I move to infrastructure as code in my environment the golden config app is your answer to that problem it solves immediate short-term problems of is my environment in compliance with what I want and then how can I maybe move into the future into a more Modern

Way of managing my network uh and we took that basic idea and we made it even better in this release making it more usable more consumable uh for your teams now with the ability to handle uh Ginger templating right in the UI do testing there and development all within the UI without impacting production amazing update there uh single source of Truth this is our application that allows you to synchronize data to and from Nautobot from other systems uh now we have even more uh supported systems out of the box of course you can always use this application

whether on your own or through a collaboration with us here at NTC we can enable it to virtually any system there is but out of the box we now support 14 other tools so a great impementation there that just makes it even easier to use and then finally a little bit about our net observability Tool uh it is an amazing way to enrich the data that you have in your Telemetry and to make it more useful to your teams uh to allow your tier one or your help desk or your monitoring teams to not have to look at five different screens they can look at a single

screen and see all the data they need to understand the root cause of a problem get to that detail uh be able to correlate things that may be hard to understand coming from Telemetry uh that don’t have enough sufficient metadata around them we can add that metadata in and present it to the user all dynamically on the back end so when they see that graph or those details it can be really helpful for them to be able to find problems more quickly and get to root cause faster uh we have been getting a few questions coming in so thank you for that we will

get to those don’t worry Q&A is coming up uh but next up we have uh John here coming back with a sneak peek of what’s next what can you expect coming from from NTC in 2025 yeah thanks Tim yeah so as we mentioned everything in this section uh is you know hot off the press we you will see this released out into the wild here this year in the first half of this year and first up here is NautobotGPT so um yay more AI from the industry right um you know I I say that tongue and- cheek because here at networks we we really do believe in a practical application

of AI and that’s really what we’ve been trying nail here with this offering uh that we call Nautobot gbt this is a virtual assistant tailored towards Nautobot specific tasks so one of the big things that it has been trained to do to date is to assist with the development of job code so you can ask the uh NautobotGPT assistant you know hey I’ve uh want to build a job that you know does this automation I want to deploy device configurations or I want to sync uh some data from the system that I’ve got internally uh and the agent can uh uh produce actual

viable job code for you uh to do this and you can also uh go back and forth with it right maybe you’re having a problem with the job you don’t uh quite understand how to do some complex operation with maybe one of the variables with limiting uh the filter sets available and and you just want to ask it hey I’m having a problem with this variable can you help me out and uh paste that code in and uh we found that through the through the successful training efforts that we’ve done with it uh it is very effective at uh really comprehending and understanding

these Nautobot job specific use cases uh and then of course you know through all of the material that it has been trained on it’s very good at answering any sort of Nautobot question that you throw at it you know hey how can I um you know uh get data to look like this with the with the device model you know model this type of use case and so forth um it can also help you uh if you’re doing you know different graphql operations or things like that you know crafting queries so this is uh a really going to be our first offering here with in the AI space um

this is NautobotGPT it’s going to be an offering that you can also find in Nautobot Cloud if you’re unfamiliar with Nautobot Cloud that is our uh fully managed uh Nautobot deployment infrastructure so if you’re looking for a solution where you don’t have to host Nautobot on Prim you want us to do that for you that’s Nautobot Cloud so we’d love to talk to you about that um users of Nautobot cloud will be able to take advantage of NautobotGPT uh here very soon in just the next a couple of weeks honestly uh and you’ll be seeing more and more AI feature

sets from us directly integrated into the application you know things like helping you uh to build data validation rules within the data validation engine um other examples like trying to uh help understanding golden config like what is the intent of this configuration you tell me in plain English what is this config Block doing those are exciting things that we’re we’re kind of up to uh in the AI space Within Nautobot so next up is a new uh application specific to modeling uh DNS records so just first and foremost Nautobot is not going to be a DNS or

you know DDI uh uh server kind of serving this infrastructure but what this does help you with is actually tracking DNS zones so you can create all of the common record types that you’d exist uh that you’d expect uh we will obviously take feedback from the community at what are the more kind of obscure uh record types that do exist out there and you know we can easily add support for those over time um so this is you know obviously deeply integrated into the ipam infrastructure as well within Nautobot uh we’re very excited to see how people utilize this

um we do have some examples right where you can build up entire zones and then have it spit out like a bind configuration for you using something like export templates right so uh very excited to see how people utilize this uh this is also very close to being uh released uh just a couple of weeks out next up uh some updates to device life cycle management so this is an app that is already available today so these are some further enhancements that are going to be available uh in a in the very near future with the next release of the DM PL uh uh app so

uh device life cycle management is all about trying to Define your kind of organizational standards and policies for things like software versions and Hardware uh so collecting things like notices of of end of support and end of sale from your vendors uh for both software and Hardware are kind of at the core of what device life cycle management does and one of the additional feature sets that was added some time ago is the ability to track uh cve or common vulnerabilities so this new feature set extends that to have an automated integration where we can

pull in uh cve data directly from uh nist directly into the app and so you don’t have to you know man deal with the uh you know entering of that vulnerability data to be able to get the feature sets to know like hey these are my vulnerable uh devices that are out there in the environment or you know uh software versions that are that are of issue we can pull that data directly down from n build interesting reporting capabilities um that’s the other kind of feature sets here is we have some new dashboards for the reporting capabilities for um things like

you know Hardware notices and and so forth so definitely excited about that again this release you can expect uh in the coming months kind of first half of this year okay uh next up is another new app that will be coming out uh this is an integration with Ansible so in particular AAP and awx so the um the platforms that Ansible provides for execution of Ansible playbooks so what we do here is we integrate with AAP and awx to pull in those job templates so that you actually get a Nautobot jobs like experience but you’re actually executing Ansible

playbooks within a and awx um so this is a really excellent use case for organizations that are looking to reduce the the the tool toil right like it it it obviously may make sense for you to maintain that Ansible infrastructure but um maybe Engineers are tired of dealing with yet another system that they need to log into to to execute automation right they’re already spending a ton of time in Nautobot because that is our our Network source of Truth and is the center point for a lot of the automation that we have within the organization um so now this

app will allow you to bring in the execution and serviceability of uh uh those ansible job templates directly within Nautobot next up Version Control so this is a very fun um uh app we’re very excited about the future of where this is going to be able to take Nautobot in different uh Network source of Truth use cases um if you’ve been following along with here uh you know over the last uh you know bit of time as we’ve kind of uh evolved what this is going to be you know don’t fear we’re still working on this right and this year uh first half of this

year we are going to have um a we’re going to be announcing a private beta of the solution that we’ve got here um so do please reach out to us if you are very interested in being a part of that we would love to have you uh participate and and obviously provide feedback um what this is what is Version Control right this is a a what we consider a very novel uh solution to the change management problem when it comes to a network source of truth right if we if we think about uh you know large Enterprise use cases or you know even even some of the smaller

guys do it right too where you’ve got you know very rigid change control processes that uh ultimately have Downstream effects in how we manage the data in our Network source of Truth a very good example of that is you know I can’t actually Implement a change on this interface can’t bring this interface up until I’m in a in a change window right maybe on a Saturday night or whatever right um but now I have this like weird state where it’s like I’m building configuration with the data that’s in my network source of Truth so I need that data to reflect the

intent that I want that interface to be up and typically I need to do that beforehand because I need to prep that change right I need to Stage that change I need to go through all of the the paperwork of in my change management process of saying you know this is what’s going to happen in this change which means I’ve got this conflict and kind of this timing constraint of when can I actually make that data change in my network source of Truth Versus what is actually reflected in the network right because if we do that change too early and we have other

types of automated Integrations with our Network source of Truth in particular monitoring platforms is where we see a lot of this problem right because if our intent says too early that that interface should be up and obviously it’s not yet because we haven’t gone through that uh through that that change window our monitoring system might be looking at our Network source of Truth and going there’s a conflict here right your intent says that interface is supposed to be up it’s not yet so how do we Rectify that Version Control fundamentally is how we

think um that we’re going to have a good solution to this so this is integrating a particular product called do from a from our partner uh do Hub uh where basically they have built a completely new database system that implements and combines the con TRS of git with a traditional relational database and this goes beyond just schema management this is the actual data within the database itself so if you’re unfamiliar with uh git or gitops principles it’s basically this idea that um you know we have what we call our our main branch which is where we do

most of our operations on but I want to be able to propose a change so in git we would call that you know creating a branch making our changes in our Branch committing those changes submitting what’s called a pool request so that we can get feedback on our change right is our change appropriate we can go through peer review within our engineering teams we can get sign off from our from our change uh Advisory board or so forth right before we actually do what’s called a merge back into the main which is where we would actually Implement that change so if

you’re unfamiliar with kit right this is the idea that we can have this change staged as we might in a traditional infrastructures code World kind of sitting over here in parallel to what we’re actually using on a day-to-day basis within the system and then we can Rectify those things at the appropriate time like during the change window for instance um but the Advent of a solution like do and what we’re building with the version control app here is that you not dealing with Git on the command line and kind of you know file text files you know dealing

with GitHub and things like that um this all happens within the UI within the guey of Nautobot itself so you’re interacting you’re you’re proposing this change you’re creating new devices updating those interfaces and so forth um within Nautobot itself just as you do on a regular basis it’s just not affecting anything until you actually click that merge button and those changes you know kind of get merged into that Mainline Branch so again with this is under active development uh we’re going to be targeting a private beta of this with interested parties

uh in late Q2 of this year you know targeting getting this out uh uh very soon after that all right and the last thing that I want to go through in terms of uh uh very soon to be released things is a new app for load balancer data models so you know we talked about wireless data models and vdcs earlier today so this is uh load balancing is very uh much like that in that we’re building a new set of network data models to model the basic constructs of load balancer configuration and infrastructure so uh as is key with all of our data model decisions uh we

take a vendor agnostic approach here um but it is influenced obviously by the big players in the space you know um F5 Citrix A10 Etc um so we can obviously expect to be able to do things like uh you know traditional modeling of all of our frontend virtual servers VIPs um the backend pools all of the profile configuration that you’d expect to be able to set managing the health check configuration and so forth right um and give you good visuals on kind of all of the infrastructure here so this again will allow us to deeply integrate uh load balancing

infrastructure configuration into the overall network data model you can expect ssot Integrations with this with different vendor implementations in the future but this also uh will be in the first half of this year as well so with that um you know there’s a lot of exciting updates coming later this year kind of first half with these updates but I’ll hand it back over to Tim now John yeah we’re g to move into the QA section uh we did get a fair number of questions from you all we are going to do our best to get through them um if you have questions I

did see a few hands- raised in uh from the attendees please use the Q&A box we want to get your question answered uh we may run a little bit long so hopefully you can stick around uh we will try to get all of your questions answered here uh on the webinar here today uh first up for uh John and Christian we got two that were kind of the same question which basically boiled down to when are we going to be able to model vpns and tunnels in the data model yeah great great question um it that’s another one that comes up a lot too uh for sure and I can

proudly say we are actively working on it right now um so that is another one that you will see a little bit later we chose not to include it here because we’re very in very early stages of of what we want to do there and again like every decision that we make from a data modeling standpoint we want to make sure we get it right um and that we service you know kind of the broad spectrum of needs especially from our large Enterprise customers but I can say that we are actively working on it and you can see some updates for that in the in the coming months

yes so we absolutely hear you we are going to get this done for you uh but as John mentioned as all things at NTC when we do it we do it right we do it right the first time right so we don’t want to rush it out the door before it’s ready uh next question coming in uh what about uh Wireless model support for say like uh backend infrastructure that you might have if you were a wireless ISP um you know maybe backhole rout radio or something like that so kind of uh the ability to expand that model into more than what we might have today yeah yeah definitely

it’s uh it’s something that that definitely came up you know so what you see is our in our first iteration is again you know kind of targeting Wireless uh Enterprise access deployments um but yeah you know we we’ve definitely talked about the Wisp use cases in the past I would say we’d love you know if you if you could reach out to us we could you know maybe talk a little more specifically about what your expectations and needs are with that um but it’s certainly something that uh would would fit well within Nautobot yeah and just to highlight again you

know of course here at Network to code we are always interested in hearing your feedback and uh for those that want to engage Eng with us um we can potentially also Implement features more quickly um if you’re interested in engaging us with us at a business level um not just consuming the open source project so either way but we’re here to help absolutely uh let’s see uh sud I know you had a question about learning en hands- on modules I’ve got a slide exactly for you coming up so I’m going to skip your question for a minute we will get to you though

don’t worry uh next one came in from Bruno which was uh does the floor plan app have the ability to show the exact path of wiring and P power cables whether they’re overhead or under tiles um kind of interesting question actually when you think about the Practical implications of building out in the data center sometimes it’s useful to know where does this cable actually run you know it’s overhead it’s in the tile Etc yeah do you want to take that one Christian yeah I can I can definitely um so right right now the the floor plan app basically has this

is an interesting question because the The View you have is kind of two-dimensional right now of of of your yeah of your data center floor um I would see this as definitely being kind of one natural direction for for this to um to develop in but right now today you don’t have any cable plant or or um any any way of of dragging the cables through the floor plan uh while you could probably get creative with the new features that we introduced uh they’re not explicitly meant for for modeling uh cables in there yeah but definitely something we could work on

um depending on interest from uh the community and our clients absolutely uh next question from uh giri I think sorry if I didn’t mispronounce that uh for the Nautobot GTP what llm model is it using does it support a local llm um is it open source is it extensible yeah so uh the initial offering that we are going to have uh within Nautobot Cloud uh is integrated with open AI as a partner um we are exploring some options for local llm models especially as it relates to kind of Enterprise uh constraints that you know are pretty prevalent these days but

yeah we’re we’re very excited that the fature set that we have enabled kind of with that with that open AI integration uh for now but yeah just you know certainly we’re open to the feedback and and it is something that that that we are thinking about uh related was is NautobotGPT an open source app um you know at the moment it is going to be part of our uh Nautobot Cloud uh service um there may be future Poss possibilities as we look at that but of course as always uh everything that especially these types of applications that you see us developing they

will be available first to our Cloud consumers and our Cloud users uh okay let’s see here we have another question coming in about uh the Ansible uh integration in the Ansible API or the ability to uh utilize Ansible more tightly within Nautobot uh can we can you give us a simple use case of how uh you might use it in line with Nautobot say is it attached with from it how jobs are used is it the same as how you might use a job like a little bit more detail I guess just kind of on how you might use it in a pipeline yeah so it’s it’s a it’s a very jobs

like experience so it is distinct from jobs um but the look and feel of how you interact with them is very similar to our our jobs interface um so the kind of the example that you would see is kind of an organization that maybe already has a good bit invested in ansible today or where it makes sense you know we’ve got other teams that are building Ansible Playbook and so forth and we want to consume them in that way so you can bring them into Nautobot and have that very similar user experience um just the fact that they are you know executing in an AAP

or an awx environment got it uh and then what about if you were uh integrating with get uh and how how might you be using that as far as uh targeting a g instance um is it only for deploying of config or is it for Version Control I think this is the the question behind the idea behind this question was about using get and Version Control uh accommodation sure sure yeah so so I I’ll point out definitely you know we have some very specific uh other git in uh Integrations that exist today have existed since kind of the the the dawn of Nautobot uh where we

can pull in certain data source elements from a git repository um most notably like in the golden config example you temp templates uh and other aspects of how golden config is is run today are sourced from git repositories so certain aspects of kind of like the the gitops infrastructures code flow work in that respect with the Nautobot there’s other examples like we can Source what we call config context data which is another part of our network data model you can source that data from a git repository today and as far as you know how that existing

feature set might align with Version Control the the constructs of git are kind of the same fundamentally it’s different Technologies under the hood right but uh if the question maybe is more centered you know will I still be able to do those things with the version control app the answer is definitely yes and then continuing that thought process the question just came in expanding on that which is um so can I also integrate a CI pipeline so that perhaps an engineer could understand secondary effects of their proposed change absolutely yeah that is

definitely one of the primary examples of uh and and workflows on ly of how we want the version control app to kind of be consumed in the end is you know you can imagine web hooks that would be attached to uh pool request events you just like GitHub works today exactly right so like we can kick off a web Hook when someone opens a poll request that launches a CIP pipeline maybe in traditional cicd infrastructure even like in a Jenkins or a GitHub actions even right um or in some other way like maybe we’re kicking off in Ansible Playbook somewhere else or

even uh job hooks integration where we’re doing that uh testing and validation within Nautobot itself through jobs that we’ve written so that we can take the uh proposed change as you mentioned and maybe build a proposed intended configuration diff it against um you know what’s what’s actually out there today and and um you know provide that back as feedback to the to the person that submitted the pr right just like you would expect in a traditional cicd pipeline absolutely yeah and I mean I think you know as as you you all probably saw John was really

excited about talking about the Version Control piece even though it was just kind of one of the sneak peeks um but as as those of us that really want to embrace the devops methodologies this is finally bringing true devops and network management um and so that’s why we get so excited about it even though it’s been a long journey uh and it’s still a journey yet to go um it’s going to be really incredible as we begin to really Empower teams to operate in true devops Fashions as they manage their networks uh another question here about um what about

modeling fleets of software load balancers like ha proxy and nnx uh in the new uh load balancer model yeah so definitely we we think that our data model will be able to support use cases like that um if you have you know some specific constraints you know we’ certainly love to hear your feedback you know you can reach out to us through you know slack or you know reach out to uh to to Tim and team directly right and we can we can we can definitely take that feedback but it it’s certainly within the domain of kind of what we’re already designing within

the load balancer app to support that type of use case and uh one final question uh as as with G is it typically used to back up your Global configuration of Nautobot so kind of an interesting concept here I think it’s about just like how do I back up my Nautobot uh yeah it it certainly could be right so one of the you know I’ll call it maybe unintended consequences of the way that the version control app works is it can actually be used to do that like I can create a mirror of um of the data that I’ve got in Nautobot and you know I could have some

other infrastructure that maybe syncs that over to another instance for for different purposes so yeah it it could certainly be used in that way cool uh so thanks everyone for all of your interest your questions uh thank you for engaging with us as we went through this really exciting update that we wanted to bring to you just a quick recap here um so Nautobot 2.4 we went through a lot of cool core improvements uh the updates we’ve made to our applications and a sneak peek of what’s coming next especially cool stuff like Version Control and being able

to handle your adult uh or used adult sorry database uh to actually instantiate cicd uh pipelines into your network management process uh coming up uh so here we have an answer for S hopefully you’re still here on the webinar uh for those that really want to engage and understand Nautobot get hands-on experience learn more and really get into the details um take our 100 days of Nautobot challenge uh with Eric Chow here at NTC uh you can register using the link down below um and really get into the details have practical Hands-On Labs along with learning

from Eric directly As you move through that session great way to get engaged to understand and really uh also get engaged with the community uh there’s been a really active community of folks going through this process both on LinkedIn in the slack Channel um so if you need help as you’re going through you can reach out in both of those places to uh engage and find that we did just drop the links as well for you in the chat so you can click them there rather than having to grab them off the screenshot um if you like thank you everyone for attending here

are some links to all things Nautobot related both to the project as well as to the applications and the documentation um as always if you’re interested in seeing a Hands-On demo please reach out to us we would love to set up a one-on-one session with you and your team we can go through and show you the advantages of the platform um but also advantages of working with network to code and what value we bring um Beyond just what what you get from the open source project so thanks everyone again for joining us for this exciting update to Nautobot Nautobot 2.4 our Mega release thanks and look forward to seeing you on the next webinar