Nautobot v2.4 Release: What’s New

Starting 2025 off with a bang, Nautobot v2.4 introduces several key updates designed to enhance platform capabilities and enable new Network Automation opportunities. With this release, network engineers gain access to a suite of powerful new data models, integrations, and improvements aimed at making network automation and management more effective using Nautobot. Let’s dig into some of the Nautobot Core highlights, followed by some updates in the Apps ecosystem.

Virtual Device Context Data Models

Data Models

This release adds the ability to model logical partitions of physical network devices, allowing proper representation and tracking of VDC technologies across vendor offerings. Logical partitions–like Cisco’s Nexus VDC, Juniper’s Logical Systems, or Arista’s multi-instances EOS–allow devices to function as multiple independent units with distinct configurations, interfaces, and network identities. These new Nautobot models are particularly valuable for scenarios requiring operational separation or workload segmentation, such as multitenant environments or large-scale deployments where resources need to be allocated dynamically. In Nautobot, we want to ensure the most flexibility in the way VDCs work, to support all of the various vendor implementations, including interfaces that belong to multiple VDCs, and that the visibility to a device’s assigned VDCs is easily accessible.

Wireless Data Models

network

Nautobot now provides extensive capabilities for tracking enterprise wireless networks through new data models, representing wireless network configuration and deployment. These tools establish a base framework for documenting and automating workflows in modern wireless environments.

The key features of these models include:

  • Maintaining a comprehensive inventory of SSIDs and their associated configurations.
  • Organizing Access Points using Controller Managed Device Groups for improved operational clarity.
  • Defining and implementing radio frequency settings via Radio Profiles, which helps optimize network performance and reliability.

Unlike other wireless management tools, Nautobot’s wireless feature set focuses on the real world of enterprise wireless access management, providing multivendor support and going beyond point-to-point links, supporting a variety of engineering scenarios and common enterprise topology types.

Apps Marketplace

App marketplace

The Apps Marketplace introduces a centralized location where users can explore the growing ecosystem of Nautobot Apps. This interface provides comprehensive details about each app, including its purpose, key features, and integration options, making it easier for users to identify and deploy the solutions that best meet their needs.

To further enhance usability, the Installed Apps page now includes a tile-view layout, offering a more intuitive and visually engaging way to navigate and manage the apps already in use. These updates simplify the process of extending Nautobot’s functionality, whether through community contributions or Network to Code solutions.

Jinja2 Template Rendering Tool

Jinja2

Nautobot v2.4 adds a powerful new feature for rendering Jinja2 templates directly within the platform. Users can input custom template bodies and context data for rendering, leveraging Nautobot’s extensive library of built-in Jinja2 tags and filters, negating the need for external tools.

This feature is particularly useful when paired with apps like Nautobot Golden Config, simplifying template development and validation. Future updates will focus on tighter integration with Nautobot’s contextual data, such as Devices and Config Contexts, enabling users to dynamically generate configurations and other artifacts on-demand, within the platform.

Event Publication Framework

With this release, Nautobot introduces a versatile and extensible framework for event-driven automation, e.g., real-time configuration management or monitoring event enrichment. This feature enables the publication of event notifications to various external systems such as Redis, Kafka, or other message brokers, allowing seamless integration with existing tools and workflows. Key data related activities, plus Job execution, and user-centric event types can be configured to automatically send to subscribers.

This feature set comes directly from customer demand to operate network automation solutions at higher scale, in which decoupled integration points are required, affording more agility in downstream system design, especially in larger enterprise environments, where event-based architectures are already being heavily utilized.

The EventBroker API supports customization and can be extended to publish events to additional message brokers as needed. This capability not only facilitates real-time integrations but also allows apps to define and publish new event types, expanding the scope of automation opportunities. Organizations can leverage this framework to build dynamic workflows and enhance interoperability with their broader platforms.

Kubernetes Job Execution

Nautobot now supports a Kubernetes-native approach to Job execution, enabling the use of short-lived Kubernetes Job pods. This approach improves resource efficiency and scalability compared to the traditional deployment model of persistent Celery Worker pods. The Kubernetes integration is particularly beneficial for environments that demand dynamic scaling and resource optimization, aligning with modern cloud-native practices. Please note that this feature is currently released in experimental status so we can hear your feedback and make necessary improvements.

UI Component Framework

A new UI Component Framework simplifies the development of user interface components by providing Python APIs for defining UI elements in a Nautobot-specific manner. This eliminates much of the boilerplate HTML code previously required and ensures consistency across the platform. The initial focus of this framework is on simplifying the creation of object “detail” views, one of the more challenging areas of UI development and customization.

By decoupling apps from Nautobot’s current CSS and layout (based on the Bootstrap 3 framework), the framework ensures that future UI updates can be adopted with minimal impact on compliant apps. This reduces maintenance requirements and promotes the adoption of scalable, efficient practices, focusing on Python development, without the direct need for UI frontend skills.

Apps Ecosystem

This release cycle also brings a number of meaningful updates to solutions in the Nautobot App ecosystem, including new data models, integrations, and automation capabilities. There are too many to number, but let’s look at a few of the larger app releases.

Single Source of Truth—SSoT

SSoT has been significantly enhanced with new integrations, including Citrix ADM, Cisco DNA Center, Itential, Cisco Meraki, Slurp’it, Bootstrap, LibreNMS, and SolarWinds Orion. These additions expand the app’s ability to synchronize data with a wider range of external systems, enabling more out-of-the-box network automation wins. Alongside these integrations, the documentation has undergone a complete overhaul, improving clarity and usability to help users better understand and implement these features effectively, and to build their own SSoT integrations. Check out the docs for SSoT.

Design Builder

Design lifecycle capabilities now include features such as change trackability to monitor and audit modifications, data locking and change protection to prevent unauthorized updates, design versioning for maintaining a clear history of revisions, and enhanced data import tools that streamline the integration of external data into existing designs. These improvements provide greater control and transparency over the architectural design and implementation phases of network administration. Check out the docs for Design Builder.

DNS Models

The DNS Models app is coming soon and brings new models for tracking DNS Zones and a comprehensive range of record types, including A, AAAA, NS, CNAME, MX, TXT, and PTR. These updates provide administrators with a detailed and centralized system for managing DNS configurations, and in the future is prime for integration with SSoT to manage the full lifecycle of DNS infrastructure.

Floor Plan

We have made a number of enhancements to the Floor Plan app, which allows you to visually depict a rack layout in a facility. These new features support variable grid axis identifiers, allowing for much more flexibility in how floor plan location placements are made, especially in complex datacenter designs, such as multitenant facilities that provide physical segmentation. Larger facilities will also benefit from better representations and linking of child floor plans in the UI. Check out the docs for Floor Plan.

Device Lifecycle Management—DLM

DLM has seen a number of changes and enhancements over the last several months. Namely, some of the software and contact models have moved to Nautobot Core to service more general use cases. DLM will soon see an update to make direct use of them, automatically moving existing software data over. You will see DLM continue to focus on lifecycle workflows related to validated hardware and software going forward.

Additional enhancements include a Hardware Notice Reporting Job and Dashboard, which provides comprehensive insights into hardware lifecycle events. Contracts are now prominently displayed on the device details page, offering quick access to relevant information. A new “NIST – Software CVE Search” Job has also been introduced. This job queries the NIST database for CVE records associated with specific software versions, then creates or updates corresponding CVE records in Nautobot, linking them to the relevant software versions. Check out the docs for DLM.


Conclusion

We are extremely excited to start 2025 off with the release of Nautobot v2.4 along with related Apps, and we can’t wait to see how you and the rest of the community use these new features to push the Network Automation needle forward. Be sure to read over the release notes prior to upgrade. v2.4 is just the beginning of a very ambitious year for the entire Nautobot ecosystem, and we can’t wait to share all that we have planned!

-John



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