Introducing Nautobot’s Floor Plan Application

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Nautobot is the Source of Truth for your network and a platform that supports an application ecosystem. The most recent addition to the Nautobot Application Ecosystem is the Nautobot Floor Plan Application. Simply put, this application allows firms to map out and plan their physical space requirements, in a top-down view format, in locations such as data centers and colocation cages.

Benefits of Data Aggregation/Consolidation in the Floor Plan App

Having all your data that describes your desired network state in one place has a few advantages, including allowing users to expose relationships between different objects and easily access related data about a given object. These capabilities are not possible if the various data types are kept in disparate systems.

Nautobot can act as an aggregation layer across all the authoritative data sources in your environment.

The Nautobot Floor Plan Application itself has two tremendous benefits:

  • It allows a firm to model, understand, and plan its floor space.
  • It exposes relationships and allows easy navigation between the component racks and spaces in the floor plans and objects like the rack elevation drawing, device information, and site information.

This post will discuss and elaborate on these benefits.

Example Use Case Study

The Floor Plan Application aids in data center management by providing the ability to create a gridded representation of the floor plan of a Nautobot Location and indicate the relative location of each Nautobot Rack within that floor plan.

This example floor plan, below, created with the app, shows a lot of useful information:

  • Two rows of racks (dark green) with the rack numbers and amount of rack units consumed (ex: 3 / 48 RU)
  • A cold aisle (blue) between the two rack rows
  • Hot aisles (orange) on the outside of each rack row
  • Racks ams01-101 through ams01-104 face to the right (indicated by the white gap on each grid space)
  • Racks ams01-105 through ams01-108 face to the left (indicated by the white gap on each grid space)
  • An unusable space in grid 4, 1 (X, Y) (gray)
  • A planned rack ams01-109 in space 4, 6 (light green) that will face left (indicated by the black gap on the grid space)

Also notice that the app allows users to create multi-tile objects. In the example floor plan, the cold aisle spans four tiles vertically, as described by the Y size parameter below:

Leveraging the Floor Plans in Nautobot

Having all the data for your desired network state in Nautobot makes it easier for us, as humans, to understand what is often a very complex environment. Let’s look at a scenario using our prior floor plan example.

In this scenario, the user has leveraged the Floor Plan App to model out the floor plan in the ams01 site and wants to better understand the equipment deployed in the ams01 racks shown.

Easy navigation in Nautobot from one object to related objects helps people understand what is typically a complex environment.

The layout shows that rack ams01-102 has 3 of the 48 available rack units occupied:

To further explore, the user can click in the middle of the ams01-102 grid square (representing a tile) to be taken to the rack’s home page in Nautobot. Once here, there is a wealth of useful information in the Rack panel:

  • The quantity of devices in the rack
  • The rack’s Tenant (owner)
  • The space and power utilization in the rack
  • To the right of the Rack panel there are rack elevation drawings for the front and back of the rack, displaying which rack units are occupied by which objects.
    • Clicking on an object on the rack elevation drawing will take you to the home page for that object.
  • The user sees that ams01-edge-02 is taking up rack units 40-41.
  • The user clicks on the image of ams01-edge-02 in the elevation drawing to go to the home page for that device.
  • The page shows details about the device, such as Device Type, Role, and management IP address.

Easily navigating between these related objects saves users time and effort and helps to tie together the different aspects of, and data types involved in, activities such as space and power planning. This association of related objects can also simplify your automation infrastructure because it exposes the related fields and Custom Relationship via the GraphQL API. This allows you to construct a GraphQL query that is able to traverse both related fields and Custom Relationships to provide a more meaningful response.

Easily associating an object to other related objects in Nautobot also simplifies your automation infrastructure.

Creating and Editing the Floor Plans

The creation of floor plans is explained very well in the app’s documentation.

Why Is This Valuable?

The Floor Plan Application allows firms to effectively understand and plan their physical spaces in Nautobot because it not only models out the physical space, but also allows the users and automation to quickly navigate to other related data, such as power utilization in a given rack or a specific device model in a specific rack unit. Additionally, Nautobot’s automation features, such as robust RESTful APIs and GraphQL interface, allow for immersive programmatic integration with a firm’s automation infrastructure, allowing the firm to work toward fully automating space and power planning workflows, including running space and power reports for specific pods, rows, and racks.

Where to Find Nautobot’s Floor Plan Application

Code

The Nautobot Floor Plan Application code repository can be found on GitHub.

Docs

The documentation is here. This also includes installation instructions.

Want to Try It Out?

The Nautobot Floor Plan App is available to demo online in Network to Code’s Nautobot public sandbox environment. Once you log in (the user/password are shown in the blue banner when you access the URL), navigate from the top-level menu Organization –> Location Floor Plans. From here you can select a specific site and view the floor plan.

NOTE: To scroll your browser window so that the floor plan is fully in view, click and drag the scroll bar on the right side of your browser window. Using your scroll wheel when the cursor is over any part of the floor plan will zoom in or out rather than scrolling the window. Once you are zoomed in, you can click and drag to scroll.

From there you can do things like:

  • Click on the ‘+’ or pencil icon on a square (tile) to edit a square’s attributes
    • Add a specific rack in the square.
    • Specify a status (reserved, hot aisle, code aisle, unusable, etc.) for the square.
    • Specify a rack’s orientation in the square.
  • Navigate to Organization –> Statuses to view, create, update, or delete statuses for use on the Floor Plans.

You can also join NTC’s public Slack channel and ask questions about the Floor Plan App in the #nautobot channel.

Wrapping Up

The Nautobot Floor Plan Application brings exciting and powerful capabilities to firms that:

  • Want a convenient tool to manage their physical floor space
  • Want a floor space planning tool that will integrate easily into an automated planning workflow; examples include:
    • Automated space and power reports for a given pod, site, row, or rack
    • Automated site floor layout planning Jobs
  • Want to leverage Nautobot as a Source of Truth and understand that the more data Nautobot holds, the more value it provides

We are very excited to start talking with current and potential Nautobot users about this application; we hope that you are excited to try it out and that it delivers value to you and your firm!

Thank you, and have a great day!

-Tim



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Introducing Nautobot v2.3.0

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Nautobot v2.3.0 has just been released, and we’re excited to share some of the new features and important changes that it includes!

Cloud Modeling

Nautobot v2.3.0 adds a new built-in “Cloud” app with four initial data models (CloudAccountCloudResourceTypeCloudNetwork, and CloudService). This app and models are designed specifically for the purpose of representing the cloud-based parts of your network in Nautobot, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), Azure VNETs, Application Load Balancers (ALBs) and Network Load Balancers (NLBs), and so forth.

Modular Devices

With Nautobot v2.3.0, you can now model modular network hardware in greater detail than ever before with the new, nestable ModuleBayTemplateModuleBayModuleType, and Module data models. With these, you can track individual line cards and route processors (including “cold standby” hardware not presently installed into a device), directly define interfaces and other port types as belonging to a specific module within the larger device, and even model your network hardware down to the level of individual SFP transceiver modules if you so desire.

Object Metadata

A new set of functionality designed specifically for the needs of enterprise users, Object Metadata lets you flexibly define and track information about your network data in Nautobot, such as its provenance, ownership, and classification. For example, you might use this feature to track, on a per-record or even per-field basis:

  • Who is responsible for the accuracy of this data?
  • When (after what date) can this data be deleted?
  • What is the classification or risk level of this data?
  • Which system of record is this data originally sourced from?

Object Metadata will be especially useful to users in highly regulated industries and those with significant compliance and/or auditing mandates, as it can be used for data security, data orchestration, and data attestation applications. This functionality was previously only available via custom App development, but it has been requested by our users and customers often enough that we decided to go ahead and implement it as a core Nautobot feature.

Shareable Saved Views

Do you have that Device table configured just the way you like it, with specific columns shown or hidden, specific sorting, custom filters, and pagination? Now you can save sets of display preferences for any object table within Nautobot as “saved views”. Users can define multiple saved views for a given table, switch between them with ease, and even share their saved views with other users, allowing teams to define a shared user interface (UI) for their specific workflows. Furthermore, Nautobot administrators can even set a specific saved view as the default for a given view, which users can begin from to further customize Nautobot’s UI to their own liking.

Enhanced Dynamic Groups

A third type of Dynamic Groups, “static” groups, are now available in Nautobot v2.3.0. The existing two types of groups (filter-defined and set-operation-defined) are still fully supported, but this third type is defined by directly assigning individual records to the group, providing the most granular control yet over Dynamic Group membership. These new groups have the same data model and APIs as the other group types, meaning that your Jobs and Apps (such as Nautobot Golden Config) can use these new groups immediately, with no updates necessary.

Additionally:

  • You can now assign a tenant and/or tags to each Dynamic Group.
  • The performance of Dynamic Group resolution and members lookup has been greatly improved thanks to a redesigned caching implementation.
  • Dynamic Groups are now supported by many more of Nautobot’s object types than ever before.

Interface Roles

A long-requested feature, Nautobot v2.3.0 now lets you assign user-definable Roles to individual device Interfaces (including virtual machine interfaces) for purposes of classification and configuration management.


Conclusion

We’ve covered many of the high points of this release above, but there’s so much more to Nautobot v2.3.0, including dozens of bug fixes, UI enhancements, and additional features. As always, you can read the release notes for full details, and try out the latest Nautobot release at demo.nautobot.com to see these features in action.

-Glenn Matthews



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Unlocking the Power of Network Automation—How Large Enterprises Can Stay Ahead

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In today’s digital transformation era, traditional manual network management processes fall short in managing the complexity and scale of modern networks.

Particularly for large enterprises operating expansive networks across multiple locations and serving vast user bases, automation presents a critical advantage.

Why? Because it offers a streamlined and efficient approach to network configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Automation of repetitive tasks through intelligent algorithms not only enhances network reliability and operational efficiency but also frees up IT teams to concentrate on strategic initiatives, thus adding significant value to business operations.

The Value of Network Automation for Large Enterprises

Network automation is not just a luxury for large enterprises; it has become a necessity. With the ever-increasing demand for seamless connectivity to a growing number of users and devices, these organizations cannot afford unreliable networks, downtime, or delays in implementing changes. By automating network configuration and management, large enterprises can ensure faster provisioning, reduce human errors, and enhance overall performance.

Moreover, network automation enables large enterprises to adapt quickly to changing business needs. As new services and applications are introduced, network infrastructure must be agile enough to support them. Manual configuration processes can be time-consuming and error-prone, leading to delays in service deployment. With network automation, large enterprises can respond to business requirements promptly, gaining a competitive edge in the market.

Network automation is not just a buzzword; it is a growing trend in the industry. According to a recent Gartner study, a growing percentage of large enterprises now automate more than half of their network activities, reflecting a robust trend toward embracing automation technology.

One of the key drivers behind this trend is the increasing complexity of networks. As networks become more distributed and hybrid in nature, the inefficiency of manual management becomes a significant obstacle. Network automation provides a centralized and standardized approach to network configuration and monitoring, simplifying operations and improving overall network performance.

Understanding the Role of Network Source of Truth in Automation

In network automation, the concept of a network source of truth plays a crucial role. It refers to a centralized repository or database that holds accurate and up-to-date information about the network infrastructure. This source of truth serves as a single reference point for network engineers and automation tools, ensuring consistency and accuracy in network configurations.

By having a reliable source of truth, large enterprises can avoid configuration conflicts and minimize the risk of network outages. Network changes automatically synchronize with the source of truth, ensuring it remains the authoritative record of the network state. This not only simplifies troubleshooting but also enables efficient network auditing and compliance management.

Introducing Nautobot: A Powerful Network Automation Tool

Selecting the right tool is pivotal for network automation success. Among the leading solutions is Nautobot, an open source platform that has become a favorite among large enterprises for its robust capabilities in network management. It provides an excellent framework for managing network infrastructure, from device configuration to IP address management.

Nautobot offers a wide range of features that make network automation a breeze. It allows for the creation of standardized network templates, enabling consistent and error-free network configurations. With its intuitive user interface, network engineers can easily visualize and manage network devices, interfaces, and connections. Nautobot also integrates seamlessly with other automation tools and platforms, making it a versatile choice for large enterprises.

The Benefits of Using Nautobot for Large Enterprises

By using Nautobot for network automation, large organizations can more quickly provision and deploy network services. By automating the configuration process, network engineers can save valuable time and effort, allowing for rapid service delivery.

Nautobot also enhances network reliability and stability. With its centralized source of truth and standardized templates, it minimizes configuration errors and reduces the risk of network outages. This translates into improved user experience and increased customer satisfaction.

Additionally, Nautobot provides a scalable and flexible solution for large enterprises. As network infrastructure grows and evolves, Nautobot can easily adapt to accommodate new devices and technologies. Its modular architecture allows for seamless integration with existing systems, ensuring a smooth transition to network automation.

Calculating the ROI of Network Automation

Although implementing network automation demands substantial time, resources, and budget, the long-term ROI justifies the initial investment. To justify this investment, large enterprises need to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of network automation.

While the benefits of network automation are evident, quantifying the financial impact can help organizations make informed decisions.

By automating manual tasks, large enterprises can benefit in multiple ways:

  • Reduce labor costs and minimize human errors, resulting in significant cost savings
  • Focus on strategic initiatives, driving innovation and improving overall productivity
  • Provide faster response times, reduce network downtime, and deliver better quality services to end users
  • Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, strengthening business outcomes

Best Practices for Implementing Network Automation in Large Enterprises

Implementing network automation in large enterprises requires careful planning and execution. Here are some best practices to consider:

  1. Start small, but think big. Begin by automating a few processes or tasks before scaling up. Starting with reporting or data sync tasks before impacting actual network operations is also a smart initial step. This allows time for learning and practice with the tools and concepts, creates a gradual transition, and minimizes disruption to existing operations.
  2. Involve stakeholders. Engage key stakeholders, including network engineers, IT teams, and business leaders, early in the process. Their input and support are crucial for successful implementation.
  3. Invest in training and upskilling. Network automation requires a new set of skills and knowledge. Provide training and resources to equip your IT teams with the necessary expertise to leverage automation tools effectively.
  4. Establish clear goals and metrics. Define clear objectives and key performance indicators for network automation. Regularly measure and track progress to ensure alignment with business goals.
  5. Leverage vendor support. Seek assistance from automation tool vendors or consultants who specialize in network automation. Their expertise can help streamline the implementation process and address any challenges.

Training and Resources for Network Automation

Various training and resources are available to empower large enterprises to adopt network automation.

Online courses, certifications, and workshops provide valuable insights into network automation best practices, tools, and implementation strategies. Additionally, vendor documentation, forums, and user communities offer a wealth of knowledge and support for those starting their network automation journey.

By investing in training and leveraging available resources, large enterprises can equip their IT teams with the necessary skills and knowledge to drive successful network automation initiatives.

Embracing the Future with Network Automation

Network automation is no longer a distant dream; it is the present and future of network management. Large enterprises cannot afford to overlook the benefits it brings in terms of efficiency, reliability, and scalability. By embracing network automation, these organizations can stay ahead of the competition, deliver better services to their customers, and achieve long-term success.

With tools such as Nautobot and a strategic approach to implementation, large enterprises can unlock the full potential of network automation. By investing in training and resources, organizations can empower their IT teams to become automation champions, driving innovation and transforming the way networks are managed.

Start harnessing the power of network automation today and unlock limitless possibilities for your large enterprise. Contact us to discover how our solutions can transform the way to build, manage, and operate your network.


Conclusion

Ready to take your network automation journey to the next level? Explore Nautobot and start streamlining your network operations today.

-Chris Murray


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