Welcome to another episode of What’s up, home? weirdness! Who wouldn’t have their own NetBox at home – and who wouldn’t think of it as a home CMDB? I’ve just started experimenting with it. For those who do not know, a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is the source of truth for your inventory of stuff. In data centers, it keeps track of your servers, their cables, and everything else, telling you in which data center and which rack they are.
For me… well, take a look at for yourself. One picture says more than a thousand words of my storytelling.
What is it good for?
Well… in the real business world, it’s good for many things – from knowing about your assets, their serial numbers, purchase dates, hardware configuration, and so much else. I could go as deep as that, but there’s a limit how far even I want to go with these little experiments. Today’s case is merely to demonstrate the flexibility of Zabbix, yet again.
How did I do this?
I quickly threw the data in to NetBox by hand — it looks by a lot of work to do, but in fact, it wasn’t too bad – took me about 45 minutes to do the following:
- Create a Site called “”What’s up, home?”
- Create the rooms by adding new locations and making the previously created site as their parent
- Add some manufacturers
- Add some device roles
- Add some device types
After that, adding the devices themselves is a breeze. If you have not used NetBox, this is what adding a new device looks like. Yes yes, in the real business world there would have been many more items for me to fill in, but for this case I only added the mandatory items and even those I could do just by choosing from the drop-down menus. Not a big deal.
…and the Zabbix integration?
Actually, this is something I created many years ago for other purposes, but still seems to work with today’s versions of NetBox. My little template queries NetBox over its API and asks if it has anything that matches with the host name that’s in Zabbix. If it has, then it gets the rack location and other stuff.
How this then works is pretty standard stuff. Retrieve a master item…
…and the dependent items then gather the data, parse some JSONPaths with Zabbix item preprocessing, and at least some of the items also populate bits and pieces in the Zabbix inventory. This is handy in real world, as your alerts can then contain the exact rack location and so forth about your failing devices. Add them as tags or add them as part of the alert text, your imagination is your limit.
Does it work?
Of course it does! Here’s the inventory grouped by manufacturer:
If I click on any of them, I get this:
Of course I can also browse the data through the latest data, for example…
…or I could just create some dashboards for visualizing all this. I have not done that yet, as this is what I did tonight so far and now I’m going to bed. To be continued – maybe! For now, the template only pulls data from NetBox, but I’d like to push data towards it as well, to also tell if a light bulb is powered on or not, for example. Stay tuned!
