What is Nautobot?

What is Nautobot?

Nautobot is an open-source network automation and network source of truth platform designed to help network teams manage, model, and automate their infrastructure. At its core, Nautobot provides a centralized system for storing and organizing network data—things like devices, interfaces, IP addresses, VLANs, circuits, and relationships between them. But it goes far beyond simple inventory management. Nautobot is built to serve as the foundation for network automation, enabling engineers to integrate their network data with automation workflows, APIs, and event-driven processes.

The project is maintained by the Network to Code team and was originally created as a fork of NetBox, with the goal of building a platform that focuses more deeply on automation, extensibility, and operational workflows.

In short: Nautobot is an open-source network automation platform

Why do networks need a source of truth?

Device information might live in spreadsheets, IP address management might exist in a separate tool, topology diagrams may be outdated, and automation scripts often rely on static YAML files or hand-maintained inventories. Over time, these different data sources drift apart and become inconsistent.

This is where the idea of a Network Source of Truth (NSoT) comes in.

A network source of truth is a central authoritative system that stores accurate, structured information about your network. Instead of relying on multiple disconnected systems, all tools and automation pipelines reference the same dataset.

A well-designed NSoT provides several benefits:

• Consistency – everyone references the same network data
• Automation readiness – structured data can easily feed automation tools
• Operational clarity – engineers can understand how the network is modeled
• Reduced drift – changes are tracked and governed in one place

Without a reliable source of truth, network automation quickly becomes fragile. Scripts break when data is wrong, and operational decisions are made based on outdated information.

Nautobot as a Network Source of Truth

Nautobot solves this problem by providing a structured data model for network infrastructure.

Using Nautobot, teams can model:

• Sites and locations
• Devices and device roles
• Interfaces and connections
• IP addresses and prefixes
• VLANs and VRFs
• Circuits and providers
• Racks and physical infrastructure

This structured representation of the network becomes the single place where network data lives.

Instead of:

• Maintaining inventories in spreadsheets
• Hardcoding information into automation scripts
• Manually tracking network relationships

Engineers interact with Nautobot through a web interface, API, or automation tooling. Everything references the same dataset.

But while this is powerful, it’s only part of the story.

Nautobot is more than a source of truth

Many systems can store inventory data. What makes Nautobot particularly interesting is that it was designed to enable automation workflows directly from the source of truth.

Rather than being just a passive database, Nautobot acts as an active automation platform.

Some of the capabilities that make this possible include:

Extensible data models
Organizations can extend Nautobot’s data model to represent custom infrastructure components or business logic.

Powerful APIs
Automation tools can easily read and write network data through REST APIs or GraphQL queries.

Plugins and apps
Nautobot supports an ecosystem of plugins that add automation workflows, integrations, and new features.

Event-driven automation
Changes in Nautobot can trigger automated workflows. For example, creating a new device could automatically generate configuration templates or provisioning tasks.

Integration with automation frameworks
Nautobot integrates well with tools commonly used in network automation environments.

This transforms Nautobot from a system of record into the control plane for network automation.

Why this matters for modern networks

As networks grow larger and more complex, manual operations simply don’t scale. Automation is increasingly necessary for tasks like configuration deployment, validation, provisioning, and compliance checks.

But automation depends on accurate data.

If your automation scripts rely on outdated spreadsheets or inconsistent inventories, they will eventually fail. By placing Nautobot at the center of your network tooling, you create a reliable foundation that automation can trust.

The workflow begins to look like this:

1. Network data is modeled in Nautobot
2. Automation tools consume that data
3. Changes are tracked and validated centrally
4. Automation workflows execute based on the source of truth

This approach significantly reduces operational risk while enabling more advanced automation.

Is Nautobot Open Source?

Nautobot is an open source Network Source of Truth and Network Automation Platform built as a web application on the Django Python framework with a PostgreSQL database. You can also pay for a Nautobot license which will unlock access to Nautobot Apps

Custom fields in Nautobot explained

Conclusion

Nautobot is often described as a network source of truth, and that description is accurate—but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

While Nautobot provides a powerful way to model and manage network infrastructure data, its real strength lies in how that data can drive automation, integrations, and operational workflows.

In other words, Nautobot isn’t just a place where network data lives. It’s a platform that allows that data to power modern network operations.

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