v2.6.0 - 2019-06-20
New Features
Power Panels and Feeds (#54)
NetBox now supports power circuit modeling via two new models: power panels and power feeds. Power feeds are terminated
to power panels and are optionally associated with individual racks. Each power feed defines a supply type (AC/DC),
amperage, voltage, and phase. A power port can be connected directly to a power feed, but a power feed may have only one
power port connected to it.
Additionally, the power port model, which represents a device's power input, has been extended to include fields
denoting maximum and allocated draw, in volt-amperes. This allows a device (e.g. a PDU) to calculate its total load
compared to its connected power feed.
Caching (#2647)
To improve performance, NetBox now supports caching for most object and list views. Caching is implemented using Redis,
which is now a required dependency. (Previously, Redis was required only if webhooks were enabled.)
A new configuration parameter is available to control the cache timeout:
# Cache timeout (in seconds)
CACHE_TIMEOUT = 900
View Permissions (#323)
Django 2.1 introduced the ability to enforce view-only permissions for different object types. NetBox now enforces
these by default. You can grant view permission to a user or group by assigning the "can view" permission for the
desired object(s).
To exempt certain object types from the enforcement of view permissions, so that any user (including anonymous users)
can view them, add them to the new EXEMPT_VIEW_PERMISSIONS
setting in configuration.py
:
EXEMPT_VIEW_PERMISSIONS = [
'dcim.site',
'ipam.prefix',
]
To exclude all objects, effectively disabling view permissions and restoring pre-v2.6 behavior, set:
EXEMPT_VIEW_PERMISSIONS = ['*']
Custom Links (#969)
Custom links are created under the admin UI and will be displayed on each object of the selected type. Link text and
URLs can be formed from Jinja2 template code, with the viewed object passed as context data. For example, to link to an
external NMS from the device view, you might create a custom link with the following URL:
https://nms.example.com/nodes/?name={{ obj.name }}
Custom links appear as buttons at the top of the object view. Grouped links will render as a dropdown menu beneath a
single button.
Prometheus Metrics (#3104)
NetBox now supports exposing native Prometheus metrics from the application. Prometheus is a
popular time series metric platform used for monitoring. Metric exposition can be toggled with the METRICS_ENABLED
configuration setting; it is not enabled by default. NetBox exposes metrics at the /metrics
HTTP endpoint, e.g.
https://netbox.local/metrics
.
NetBox makes use of the django-prometheus library to export a number of
different types of metrics, including:
- Per model insert, update, and delete counters
- Per view request counters
- Per view request latency histograms
- Request body size histograms
- Response body size histograms
- Response code counters
- Database connection, execution, and error counters
- Cache hit, miss, and invalidation counters
- Django middleware latency histograms
- Other Django related metadata metrics
For the exhaustive list of exposed metrics, visit the /metrics
endpoint on your NetBox instance. See the documentation
for more details on using Prometheus metrics in NetBox.
Changes
New Dependency: Redis
Redis is an in-memory data store similar to memcached. While Redis has been an optional component
of NetBox since the introduction of webhooks in version 2.4, it is now required to support NetBox's new caching
functionality (as well as other planned features). Redis can be installed via your platform's package manager: for
example, sudo apt-get install redis-server
on Ubuntu or sudo yum install redis
on CentOS.
The Redis database is configured using a configuration setting similar to DATABASE
in configuration.py
:
REDIS = {
'HOST': 'localhost',
'PORT': 6379,
'PASSWORD': '',
'DATABASE': 0,
'CACHE_DATABASE': 1,
'DEFAULT_TIMEOUT': 300,
'SSL': False,
}
Note that if you were using these settings in a prior release with webhooks, the DATABASE
setting remains the same but
an additional CACHE_DATABASE
setting has been added with a default value of 1 to support the caching backend. The
DATABASE
setting will be renamed in a future release of NetBox to better relay the meaning of the setting. It is
highly recommended to keep the webhook and cache databases seperate. Using the same database number for both may result
in webhook processing data being lost during cache flushing events.
API Support for Specifying Related Objects by Attributes (#3077)
Previously, specifying a related object in an API request required knowing the primary key (integer ID) of that object.
For example, when creating a new device, its rack would be specified as an integer:
{
"name": "MyNewDevice",
"rack": 123,
...
}
The NetBox API now also supports referencing related objects by a set of sufficiently unique attrbiutes. For example, a
rack can be identified by its name and parent site:
{
"name": "MyNewDevice",
"rack": {
"site": {
"name": "Equinix DC6"
},
"name": "R204"
},
...
}
There is no limit to the depth of nested references. Note that if the provided parameters do not return exactly one
object, a validation error is raised.
API Device/VM Config Context Included by Default (#2350)
The rendered config context for devices and VMs is now included by default in all API results (list and detail views).
Previously, the rendered config context was available only in the detail view for individual objects. Users with large
amounts of context data may observe a performance drop when returning multiple objects. To combat this, in cases where
the rendered config context is not needed, the query parameter ?exclude=config_context
may be appended to the request
URL to exclude the config context data from the API response.
Changes to Tag Permissions
NetBox now makes use of its own Tag
model instead of the stock model which ships with django-taggit. This new model
lives in the extras
app and thus any permissions that you may have configured using "Taggit | Tag" should be changed
to now use "Extras | Tag." Also note that the admin interface for tags has been removed as it was redundant to the
functionality provided by the front end UI.
CORS_ORIGIN_WHITELIST Requires URI Scheme
If you have the CORS_ORIGIN_WHITELIST
configuration parameter defined, note that each origin must now incldue a URI
scheme. This change was introuced in django-cors-headers 3.0.
Enhancements
- #166 - Add
dns_name
field to IPAddress - #524 - Added power utilization graphs to power feeds, devices, and racks
- #1792 - Add CustomFieldChoices API endpoint at
/api/extras/_custom_field_choices/
- #1863 - Add child object counts to API representation of organizational objects
- #2324 - Add
color
field for tags - #2643 - Add
description
field to console/power components and device bays - #2791 - Add
comments
field for tags - #2920 - Rename Interface
form_factor
totype
(backward-compatible until v2.7) - #2926 - Add change logging to the Tag model
- #3038 - OR logic now used when multiple values of a query filter are passed
- #3264 - Annotate changelog retention time on UI
Bug Fixes
- #2968 - Correct API documentation for SerializerMethodFields
- #3176 - Add cable trace button for console server ports and power outlets
- #3231 - Fixed cosmetic error indicating a missing schema migration
- #3239 - Corrected count of tags reported via API
Bug Fixes From v2.6-beta1
- #3123 - Exempt
/metrics
view from authentication - #3125 - Fix exception when viewing PDUs
- #3126 - Incorrect calculation of PowerFeed available power
- #3130 - Fix exception when creating a new power outlet
- #3136 - Add power draw fields to power port creation form
- #3137 - Add
power_port
andfeed_leg
fields to power outlet creation form - #3140 - Add bulk edit capability for power outlets and console server ports
- #3204 - Fix interface filtering when connecting cables
- #3207 - Fix link for connecting interface to rear port
- #3258 - Exception raised when creating/viewing a circuit with a non-connected termination
API Changes
- New API endpoints for power modeling:
/api/dcim/power-panels/
and/api/dcim/power-feeds/
- New API endpoint for custom field choices:
/api/extras/_custom_field_choices/
- ForeignKey fields now accept either the related object PK or a dictionary of attributes describing the related object.
- Organizational objects now include child object counts. For example, the Role serializer includes
prefix_count
andvlan_count
. - The
id__in
filter is now deprecated and will be removed in v2.7. (Begin using the?id=1&id=2
format instead.) - Added a
description
field for all device components. - dcim.Device: The devices list endpoint now includes rendered context data.
- dcim.DeviceType:
instance_count
has been renamed todevice_count
. - dcim.Interface:
form_factor
has been renamed totype
. Backward compatibility forform_factor
will be maintained until NetBox v2.7. - dcim.Interface: The
type
filter has been renamed tokind
. - dcim.Site: The
count_*
read-only fields have been renamed to*_count
for consistency with other objects. - dcim.Site: Added the
virtualmachine_count
read-only field. - extras.Tag: Added
color
andcomments
fields to the Tag serializer. - virtualization.VirtualMachine: The virtual machines list endpoint now includes rendered context data.