Device Role Category or Custom Field

[ryanmerolle]

Environment

NA Feature Request

Proposed Functionality

It would be useful to either setup a Device Category hierarchy to Device Roles so we can group Network, Datacenter, Server/Compute, Storage and other Device Categories to Device Roles. If this is not an easy feature request, then allowed custom fields to be added to Device Roles would also work.

Use Case

With netbox set as my infra source of truth, I am using it to provide our business application monitoring tools context about our infra in order to enrich alerting. The device roles are super useful, but it would be nice to have one more level to group these roles into categories. The only other way is to apply these categories to the device types via custom categories which is a level lower than we would want to. Example: All compute leafs should be listed as network devices and all PDUs should be listed as power or datacenter devices. To do this on each model of a device labeled as a PDU device role does not seem logical.

Database Changes

External Dependencies

Update objects int he hierarchy to show their device category where the device role is also showed. Not as important as long as we can query the API for this linkage.

[jeremystretch]

Example: All compute leafs should be listed as network devices and all PDUs should be listed as power or datacenter devices.

It sounds like you're trying to encode additional information into a field with a set context. A hierarchy likely isn't the best way, as you will inevitably come across a situation where devices of the same functional role need to be grouped differently for some reason.

You have a few options:

1. Introduce a custom field on the device model to be used in parallel to role assignment
2. Use tags to a similar effect
3. Store the mapping of roles to grouping in the system that's consuming this information (though you still risk running into the limitations of using a hierarchy)

[ryanmerolle]

@jeremystretch I agree with your assessment of my current options, I was thinking the same thing. My only hesitations:

1. I can ensure user input in the data model by restricting to a custom field with a drop down of predefined options. I cannot ensure the user selects the correct one unless I create a report that keeps track of device role association to these custom categories and audit for discrepancies in netbox reporting.
2. Tags are free form and harder to ensure data quality.
3. This would require all systems that consume this information to keep this mapping. I have this need for my tooling that is wider infra focused, so requiring tooling I do not necessarily own to keep this mapping is less than ideal.

The hierarchical inheritance/group of device role -> device type -> device makes sense to me. I just assumed either level above it in the model would be make sense or the adjusting the model to allow device role to have custom fields. That way, no user or workflow would set a device category during creation, it would just be set for them when they selected the device role.

One additional option would be to scrap my current device roles. The roles are quite useful for me with future automation, but the reality is that if I make them more high level for the downstream systems to filter by, then that solves the problem. It just eliminates more granular data I could use for configuration generation or other workflows in my specific network focus.

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