Nautobot 3.1 – Your Path to Streamlined Network Automation

Enterprise network teams know what they want to automate. The harder challenge is operationalizing it by getting automation successfully deployed and running at scale. At times this is due to questions about the solution itself–what components are needed and how to deploy them–but are more likely due to more foundational questions: how can I coordinate the multitude of tools with a single source of truth? Once that system is deployed, how can we ensure its accuracy so as to automate continuously? How can we ensure automations are completed with minimal risk and within the necessary window? And finally, once automated, how do we know it was successful? Nautobot 3.1 directly addresses each of these bottlenecks.

Commercial Offers

In building out Nautobot 3.1, the team focused on continuing to improve Nautobot’s open core solution, while expanding our marketplace by introducing commercial applications. Open source software is the foundation of Nautobot and Network to Code, and we’ve improved the usability and performance of the open source solution while introducing applications to accelerate enterprise deployments. The two new bundles, Nautobot Professional and Nautobot Enterprise, along with the existing Nautobot Cloud, allow companies to reduce time to deployment by adding functionality to quickly troubleshoot and enact change in their network.

Nautobot Professional

Nautobot Professional is the fastest way for customers to get the solution deployed: a trusted Source of Truth (SoT) that includes operational workflows to help companies get their automation foundation deployed rapidly. This allows them to build confidence with a NetDevOps system by simplifying deployment and adding new capabilities:

• Insights adds predefined dashboards to quickly provide at-a-glance information to users, including charts and widgets on network and device inventory, hardware and software lifecycle, golden configuration, and configuration compliance. This provides information at your fingertips without requiring bespoke reporting.

• Network Discovery lets users scan networks via SNMP or SSH to quickly determine network devices, analyze the results, and quickly bring them under management by integrating with Nautobot’s existing advanced Device Onboarding. This allows users to vet and compare data from the network to ensure your Source of Truth is accurate and correct.
• Nautobot Tools enhances our enterprise-grade Nautobot Support by adding platform diagnostics—jobs and a CLI command to quickly evaluate your Nautobot deployment and check its health. On top of that, live diagnostic tools (ICMP and TCP ping, Traceroute, DNS lookup, HTTP requests, and SSH verification) allow users to check device connectivity and responsiveness.

• Nautobot AI functionality adds a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to enable customers to integrate their existing inference engines with Nautobot.

Nautobot Enterprise

Nautobot Enterprise is built for teams that need automation that is repeatable, provable, and safe at enterprise scale. It’s intended for customers who know that the difficulty comes not with designing and orchestrating the changes within the network but performing those changes continuously, with maximum customizability. It is built upon and includes all functionality within Nautobot Professional, and adds new advanced automation applications including OS Upgrades and Operational Compliance, which not only operate as standalone components but work together in concert.

OS Upgrades allows users to upgrade network operating systems, while Operational Compliance allows users to design, run, and analyze operational (show) commands across devices. As an integrated solution, they allow you to perform the upgrade, validate the outcomes via customizable pre- and post-checks, identify any operational drift by running ongoing checks, and provide a historical record for future audits. In early customer deployments, these applications reduced upgrade time by 80% while delivering complete compliance records—concrete evidence of what changed, when, and why. CVE remediation is a prime example: remediations often require both configuration and OS changes. These apps let administrators move faster with a complete audit trail, cutting downtime and accelerating compliance. Apart from security and emergency network configuration changes, users can track the effects of major configuration changes, including those performed via Nautobot Golden Configuration, and ensure that their network is performing as designed.

Nautobot Cloud

Nautobot Cloud includes everything in Professional and Enterprise, delivered via a SaaS platform, plus cloud-exclusive capabilities unavailable in self-managed deployments. This includes features made possible by its Cloud DNA, such as simplified one-click operations to let users deploy, clone, upgrade, backup, restore, restart, recover, and destroy individual Nautobot deployments inside a predesigned highly-scalable always-on architecture. This lets users have full control over a multi-tier deployment and unlocks full DevOps functionality for network automation. Users can spin up and separate production from development / QA environments quickly and safely, and switch between them as needed.

On the AI front, Nautobot Cloud adds a Nautobot Query Agent which presents a conversational interface to let users query specifics about their Nautobot deployment as well as a NautobotGPT MCP server to allow direct NautobotGPT integration with your favorite IDE. Cloud Secure Proxy lets users simplify on-premises device connectivity to Nautobot Cloud by providing a simple, secure tunneled component which not only reduces firewall complexity and management but also adds support for overlapping IP addresses in highly distributed environments. This ensures that Nautobot Cloud is the simplest and easiest way to scale users from beginning their automation efforts to building advanced customized solutions.

So which of the options should users choose? It depends on where you are in your automation journey: looking to build the foundation and getting a trusted solution rapidly, or looking for that plus advanced automation capability with additional features to ensure proof of success? For on-premises customers, Nautobot Professional is designed for the former while Nautobot Enterprise is intended for the latter. For teams looking for everything in Enterprise with the added benefit of quick time-to-value, Nautobot Cloud may be a better option, as its SaaS solution reduces platform management and maintenance, giving that time back to the team to design and manage their network infrastructure. 

Nautobot 3.1 continues our trend of reducing the friction to adoption and deployment to help users gain confidence when continuing to scale their network. It focuses on user experience while adding crucial features to simplify and improve operational automation, and it represents a significant step forward for Nautobot and for the teams who rely on it. Ready to see it in action? Explore the bundles, book a demo with our Sales team, or watch our webinar for a full deep dive into everything new in 3.1.