“NetBox is intent,” Beevers explained. “This is where network teams are documenting ‘Here is what the network and the infrastructure should look like.’ Think of intent as what is in NetBox.”
With the general availability of NetBox Assurance announced this week, the platform now extends beyond documentation to address the persistent challenge of configuration drift–when live network states deviate from documented intentions.
“The problem we’re tackling is operational drift,” Beevers elaborated. “Drift is when the actual network deviates from your intent. NetBox is intent, discovery is observation, and assurance is reconciling these things.”
The Assurance solution leverages NetBox Lab’s agent-based discovery architecture, which differentiates it from traditional monolithic network discovery tools.
“We decided, from the outset, to build our discovery in an agentic approach… these little, tiny agents that you can put wherever you want in the network, and then orchestrate them as a fleet,” Beevers detailed.
This architectural approach has proven particularly valuable for organizations with segmented networks. He added that there are all kinds of networks that have never had any ability to be discovered by typical tools in the past, because they’re heavily segmented or in isolated pockets for security and compliance reasons.
