Introducing the Nautobot App Ecosystem

Nautobot is more than a Source of Truth (SoT) for your network automation data; it is an application platform, offering an extensible framework for apps that can extend its current capabilities as a SoT and even support entirely new capabilities outside SoT. For context, these Nautobot Apps or Applications have historically been referred to as plugins.

Developers can leverage Nautobot’s platform capabilities (security, SSO, RBAC, REST API framework, logging, GraphQL, Jobs, and much more), thereby reducing the amount of time needed to create a new or custom app. It is these non-functional requirements that often take the most time in building a new application.

In the relatively short time since Nautobot has been available, many Nautobot apps have been developed and already deployed into production environments.

Introducing the Nautobot App Ecosystem

These Nautobot apps provide value as stand-alone units, but also complement the other available apps, all while taking advantage of the rich SoT data already in Nautobot. For example, the Device Onboarding App can quickly get a device on-boarded into Nautobot, where the Golden Config App can then automate configuration backups for the device. Beyond backups, the Golden Configuration App can also perform configuration compliance!

Another example is the quickly growing collection of ChatOps applications enabled by the Nautobot ChatOps framework (which is also an application). The Nautobot ChatOps framework not only enables a Nautobot Chatbot to allow users communicate with Nautobot via chat, but is a framework that enables the streamlined development of additional chatbots that interact with different tools and technology (Ansible AWX/Tower, Arista CloudVision, etc).

Since the NTC community has a broad variety of needs and varying levels of technical knowledge, Network to Code has launched an app store style view that offers a consolidated roundup of the currently available Nautobot apps. This page is a virtual marketplace of Nautobot-enabled apps.

The marketplace includes featured apps, all apps and solutions, and filters to help guide users to the apps they need.

Here, users can easily browse the growing assortment of available apps, use the filter bar to view apps with specific attributes, and then click on a given app to get more information, including a more detailed description, screenshots, and the GitHub repository where the code resides.

Clicking on a marketplace app takes the user to more information about the app.

Current Apps

Currently, you’ll find apps in the marketplace that:

• Integrate with network tooling and automation systems
• Manage circuit maintenances
• On-board new network devices into the SoT
• Validate Nautobot’s SoT data
• Sync Nautobot’s SoT data with authoritative sources for specific data
• Perform backups of device configs and diffs against the desired golden config
• Enable ChatOps on various chat platforms