NetBox, Snipe-It and LibreNMS

Table of contents

  1. Managing hardware
  2. Netbox
  3. Snipe-IT
  4. LibreNMS
  5. Virtual machine settings

Managing hardware

Hardware… We all have it and we all have to “manage” it somehow (well, if you’re working in IT, you have to 😜).

I like 19” hardware because those devices save a lot of space (i.e. expressed in square meters) and I have a lot of Cisco networking hardware plus a couple of servers and storage systems at home.

Netbox

To manage the hardware of my lab, I’m using three open source tools, one of them is NetBox, which is a DCIM and IPAM (Data Center Information Management and IP Address management) tool. The screenshot below (some names are obfuscated due to OpSec reasons) shows how my 19” two-post frame looks like:

Data Center Information Management with NetBox

Snipe-IT

The second tool is Snipe-It, which is an ITAM (IT Asset Management) software, which allows me to track the inventory of my hardware (for OpSec reasons some information is obfuscated):

IT Asset Management with Snipe-It

LibreNMS

Last but not least I’m using as NMS (Network monitoring system) LibreNMS to get some nice graphs, information and alerts out of my hardware (OpSec-obfuscated):

Network Monitoring System with LibreNMS

Virtual machine settings

All tools are active projects and have a really good online documentation. In my environment, each tool is running on a dedicated virtual machine based on Debian GNU/Linux:

  • NetBox: 2 vCores, 2Gb RAM, 50Gb disk for OS, 50Gb disk for data

  • Snipe-It: 2 vCores, 2Gb RAM, 50Gb disk for OS, 50Gb disk for data

  • LibreNMS: 2 vCores, 4Gb RAM, 50Gb disk for OS, 300Gb disk for data

Note: Disk size is eventually oversized, but I have over 40Tb disk space available on my storage systems ¯_(ツ)_/¯.