Monitoring tells us how things are running. But there's a more basic question that any growing infrastructure eventually has to answer: what actually exists, and where is it? That's what NetBox is for.
NetBox is the open-source "source of truth" for our lab — a structured inventory of every device, service, and IP address we run. When we need to know what something is, where it lives, and what it's attached to, NetBox is the single place we look.
At its core, NetBox is a database and web UI for infrastructure. It models the physical and logical layout of a network in one place, so nothing is left to memory, sticky notes, or whoever happened to set it up last.
The result is that the state of the lab is written down, structured, and queryable — instead of living implicitly in configs and memory.
We picked NetBox for one reason that outweighs everything else: it's built to be the source of truth, and it's open source.
NetBox is how we answer the inventory questions that come up constantly when you run dozens of machines:
Each tool in our stack has a lane. NetBox is the source of truth — it owns what exists. Nagios owns is it up. Grafana and Prometheus own how it's performing. Loki owns logs, and Wazuh owns the security layer. Together they mean we can answer "what are we running, where is it, is it healthy, and is anything out of the ordinary" all from established, written-down sources — not from tribal knowledge.
For a lab that keeps growing, that single source of truth is what keeps the whole thing manageable. When everything is documented in one structured place, onboarding a new machine or troubleshooting an old one stops being a scavenger hunt.
As with the rest of the stack, NetBox is ordinary, well-documented open-source software deployed the straightforward way. We write these up because we believe in being open about how a self-hosted operation runs — and because keeping an honest inventory is part of running it responsibly.
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