netbox/docs/release-notes/version-2.6.md

v2.6.7 (FUTURE)

Enhancements

• #3445 - Add support for additional user defined headers to be added to webhook requests
• #3499 - Add ca_file_path to Webhook model to support user supplied CA certificate verification of webhook requests
• #3594 - Add ChoiceVar for custom scripts
• #3619 - Add 400GE OSFP interface type

Bug Fixes

• #3309 - Rewrite change logging middleware to resolve sporadic testing failures
• #3340 - Add missing options to connect front ports to console ports
• #3460 - Extend upgrade script to validate Python dependencies
• #3596 - Prevent server error when reassigning a device to a new device bay
• #3629 - Use get_lldp_neighors_detail to validation LLDP neighbors
• #3635 - Add missing cache support for the circuits app
• #3636 - Add missing rack_group field to PowerFeed CSV export
• #3652 - Limit next/previous rack by assigned rack group

---

v2.6.6 (2019-10-10)

Notes

• This release includes a migration which automatically updates all existing cables to enable filtering by site/rack (see #3259). This migration may take several minutes to complete on installations with tens of thousands of cables defined.

Enhancements

• #1941 - Add InfiniBand interface types
• #3259 - Add rack and site filters for cables
• #3471 - Disallow raw HTML in Markdown-rendered fields
• #3545 - Add MultiObjectVar for custom scripts
• #3563 - Enable editing of individual DeviceType components
• #3580 - Render text and URL fields as textareas in the custom link form
• #3581 - Introduce commit_default custom script attribute to not commit changes by default

Bug Fixes

• #3458 - Prevent primary IP address for a device/VM from being reassigned
• #3463 - Correct CSV headers for exported power feeds
• #3474 - Fix device status page loading when NAPALM call fails
• #3571 - Prevent erroneous redirects when editing tags
• #3573 - Ensure consistent display of changelog retention period
• #3574 - Change device to parent in interface editing VLAN filtering logic
• #3575 - Restore label for comments field when bulk editing circuits
• #3582 - Enforce view permissions on global search results
• #3588 - Enforce object-form JSON for local context data on devices and VMs

---

v2.6.5 (2019-09-25)

Enhancements

• #3297 - Include reserved units when calculating rack utilization
• #3347 - Extend upgrade script to automatically remove stale content types
• #3352 - Enable filtering changelog API by changed_object_id
• #3515 - Enable export templates for inventory items
• #3524 - Enable bulk editing of power outlet/power port associations
• #3529 - Enable filtering circuits list by region

Bug Fixes

• #3435 - Change IP/prefix CSV export to reference VRF name instead of RD
• #3464 - Fix foreground text color on color picker fields
• #3519 - Prevent cables from being terminated to virtual/wireless interfaces via API
• #3521 - Fix error in parseURL related to variables in API URL
• #3531 - Fixed rack role foreground color
• #3534 - Added blank option for untagged VLANs
• #3540 - Fixed virtual machine interface edit with new inline vlan edit fields
• #3543 - Added inline VLAN editing to virtual machine interfaces

---

v2.6.4 (2019-09-19)

Enhancements

• #2160 - Add bulk editing for interface VLAN assignment
• #3027 - Add local_context_data boolean filter for devices
• #3318 - Increase length of platform name and slug to 100 characters
• #3341 - Enable inline VLAN assignment while editing an interface
• #3485 - Enable embedded graphs for devices
• #3510 - Add minimum/maximum prefix length enforcement for IPNetworkVar

Bug Fixes

• #3489 - Prevent exception triggered by webhook upon object deletion
• #3501 - Fix rendering of checkboxes on custom script forms
• #3511 - Correct API URL for nested device bays
• #3513 - Fix assignment of tags when creating front/rear ports
• #3514 - Label TextVar fields when rendering custom script forms

---

v2.6.3 (2019-09-04)

New Features

Custom Scripts (#3415)

Custom scripts allow for the execution of arbitrary code via the NetBox UI. They can be used to automatically create, manipulate, or clean up objects or perform other tasks within NetBox. Scripts are defined as Python files which contain one or more subclasses of extras.scripts.Script. Variable fields can be defined within scripts, which render as form fields within the web UI to prompt the user for input data. Scripts are executed and information is logged via the web UI. Please see the docs for more detail.

Note: There are currently no API endpoints for this feature. These are planned for the upcoming v2.7 release.

Enhancements

• #3386 - Add mac_address filter for virtual machines
• #3391 - Update Bootstrap CSS to v3.4.1
• #3405 - Fix population of power port/outlet details on device creation
• #3422 - Prevent navigation menu from overlapping page content
• #3430 - Linkify platform field on device view
• #3454 - Enable filtering circuits by region
• #3456 - Enable bulk editing of tag color

Bug Fixes

• #3392 - Add database index for ObjectChange time
• #3420 - Serial number filter for racks, devices, and inventory items is now case-insensitive
• #3428 - Fixed cache invalidation issues (#3300, #3363, #3379, #3382) by switching to prefetch_related() instead of select_related() and removing use of update()
• #3421 - Fix exception when ordering power connections list by PDU
• #3424 - Fix tag coloring for non-linked tags
• #3426 - Improve API error handling for ChoiceFields

---

v2.6.2 (2019-08-02)

Enhancements

• #984 - Allow ordering circuits by A/Z side
• #3307 - Add power panels count to home page
• #3314 - Paginate object changelog entries
• #3367 - Add BNC port type and coaxial cable type
• #3368 - Indicate indefinite changelog retention when applicable
• #3370 - Add filter class to VirtualChassis API

Bug Fixes

• #3018 - Components connected via a cable must have an equal number of positions
• #3289 - Prevent position from being nullified when moving a device to a new rack
• #3293 - Enable filtering device components by multiple device IDs
• #3315 - Enable filtering devices/interfaces by multiple MAC addresses
• #3317 - Fix permissions for ConfigContextBulkDeleteView
• #3323 - Fix permission evaluation for interface connections view
• #3342 - Fix cluster delete button
• #3384 - Maximum and allocated draw fields should be included on power port template creation form
• #3385 - Fix power panels list when bulk editing power feeds

---

v2.6.1 (2019-06-25)

Enhancements

• #3154 - Add virtual_chassis_member device filter
• #3277 - Add cable trace buttons for console and power ports
• #3281 - Hide custom links which render as empty text

Bug Fixes

• #3229 - Limit rack group selection by parent site on racks list
• #3269 - Raise validation error when specifying non-existent cable terminations
• #3275 - Fix error when adding power outlets to a device type
• #3279 - Reset the PostgreSQL sequence for Tag and TaggedItem IDs
• #3283 - Fix rack group assignment on PowerFeed CSV import
• #3290 - Fix server error when viewing cascaded PDUs
• #3292 - Ignore empty URL query parameters

---

v2.6.0 (2019-06-20)

New Features

Power Panels and Feeds (#54)

NetBox now supports power circuit modeling via two new models: power panels and power feeds. Power feeds are terminated to power panels and are optionally associated with individual racks. Each power feed defines a supply type (AC/DC), amperage, voltage, and phase. A power port can be connected directly to a power feed, but a power feed may have only one power port connected to it.

Additionally, the power port model, which represents a device's power input, has been extended to include fields denoting maximum and allocated draw, in volt-amperes. This allows a device (e.g. a PDU) to calculate its total load compared to its connected power feed.

Caching (#2647)

To improve performance, NetBox now supports caching for most object and list views. Caching is implemented using Redis, which is now a required dependency. (Previously, Redis was required only if webhooks were enabled.)

A new configuration parameter is available to control the cache timeout:

# Cache timeout (in seconds)
CACHE_TIMEOUT = 900

View Permissions (#323)

Django 2.1 introduced the ability to enforce view-only permissions for different object types. NetBox now enforces these by default. You can grant view permission to a user or group by assigning the "can view" permission for the desired object(s).

To exempt certain object types from the enforcement of view permissions, so that any user (including anonymous users) can view them, add them to the new EXEMPT_VIEW_PERMISSIONS setting in configuration.py:

EXEMPT_VIEW_PERMISSIONS = [
    'dcim.site',
    'ipam.prefix',
]

To exclude all objects, effectively disabling view permissions and restoring pre-v2.6 behavior, set:

EXEMPT_VIEW_PERMISSIONS = ['*']

Custom Links (#969)

Custom links are created under the admin UI and will be displayed on each object of the selected type. Link text and URLs can be formed from Jinja2 template code, with the viewed object passed as context data. For example, to link to an external NMS from the device view, you might create a custom link with the following URL:

https://nms.example.com/nodes/?name={{ obj.name }}

Custom links appear as buttons at the top of the object view. Grouped links will render as a dropdown menu beneath a single button.

Prometheus Metrics (#3104)

NetBox now supports exposing native Prometheus metrics from the application. Prometheus is a popular time series metric platform used for monitoring. Metric exposition can be toggled with the METRICS_ENABLED configuration setting; it is not enabled by default. NetBox exposes metrics at the /metrics HTTP endpoint, e.g. https://netbox.local/metrics.

NetBox makes use of the django-prometheus library to export a number of different types of metrics, including:

• Per model insert, update, and delete counters
• Per view request counters
• Per view request latency histograms
• Request body size histograms
• Response body size histograms
• Response code counters
• Database connection, execution, and error counters
• Cache hit, miss, and invalidation counters
• Django middleware latency histograms
• Other Django related metadata metrics

For the exhaustive list of exposed metrics, visit the /metrics endpoint on your NetBox instance. See the documentation for more details on using Prometheus metrics in NetBox.

Changes

New Dependency: Redis

Redis is an in-memory data store similar to memcached. While Redis has been an optional component of NetBox since the introduction of webhooks in version 2.4, it is now required to support NetBox's new caching functionality (as well as other planned features). Redis can be installed via your platform's package manager: for example, sudo apt-get install redis-server on Ubuntu or sudo yum install redis on CentOS.

The Redis database is configured using a configuration setting similar to DATABASE in configuration.py:

REDIS = {
    'HOST': 'localhost',
    'PORT': 6379,
    'PASSWORD': '',
    'DATABASE': 0,
    'CACHE_DATABASE': 1,
    'DEFAULT_TIMEOUT': 300,
    'SSL': False,
}

Note that if you were using these settings in a prior release with webhooks, the DATABASE setting remains the same but an additional CACHE_DATABASE setting has been added with a default value of 1 to support the caching backend. The DATABASE setting will be renamed in a future release of NetBox to better relay the meaning of the setting. It is highly recommended to keep the webhook and cache databases seperate. Using the same database number for both may result in webhook processing data being lost during cache flushing events.

API Support for Specifying Related Objects by Attributes(#3077)

Previously, specifying a related object in an API request required knowing the primary key (integer ID) of that object. For example, when creating a new device, its rack would be specified as an integer:

{
    "name": "MyNewDevice",
    "rack": 123,
    ...
}

The NetBox API now also supports referencing related objects by a set of sufficiently unique attrbiutes. For example, a rack can be identified by its name and parent site:

{
    "name": "MyNewDevice",
    "rack": {
        "site": {
            "name": "Equinix DC6"
        },
        "name": "R204"
    },
    ...
}

There is no limit to the depth of nested references. Note that if the provided parameters do not return exactly one object, a validation error is raised.

API Device/VM Config Context Included by Default (#2350)

The rendered config context for devices and VMs is now included by default in all API results (list and detail views). Previously, the rendered config context was available only in the detail view for individual objects. Users with large amounts of context data may observe a performance drop when returning multiple objects. To combat this, in cases where the rendered config context is not needed, the query parameter ?exclude=config_context may be appended to the request URL to exclude the config context data from the API response.

Changes to Tag Permissions

NetBox now makes use of its own Tag model instead of the stock model which ships with django-taggit. This new model lives in the extras app and thus any permissions that you may have configured using "Taggit | Tag" should be changed to now use "Extras | Tag." Also note that the admin interface for tags has been removed as it was redundant to the functionality provided by the front end UI.

CORS_ORIGIN_WHITELIST Requires URI Scheme

If you have the CORS_ORIGIN_WHITELIST configuration parameter defined, note that each origin must now incldue a URI scheme. This change was introuced in django-cors-headers 3.0.

Enhancements

• #166 - Add dns_name field to IPAddress
• #524 - Added power utilization graphs to power feeds, devices, and racks
• #1792 - Add CustomFieldChoices API endpoint at /api/extras/_custom_field_choices/
• #1863 - Add child object counts to API representation of organizational objects
• #2324 - Add color field for tags
• #2643 - Add description field to console/power components and device bays
• #2791 - Add comments field for tags
• #2920 - Rename Interface form_factor to type (backward-compatible until v2.7)
• #2926 - Add change logging to the Tag model
• #3038 - OR logic now used when multiple values of a query filter are passed
• #3264 - Annotate changelog retention time on UI

Bug Fixes

• #2968 - Correct API documentation for SerializerMethodFields
• #3176 - Add cable trace button for console server ports and power outlets
• #3231 - Fixed cosmetic error indicating a missing schema migration
• #3239 - Corrected count of tags reported via API

Bug Fixes From v2.6-beta1

• #3123 - Exempt /metrics view from authentication
• #3125 - Fix exception when viewing PDUs
• #3126 - Incorrect calculation of PowerFeed available power
• #3130 - Fix exception when creating a new power outlet
• #3136 - Add power draw fields to power port creation form
• #3137 - Add power_port and feed_leg fields to power outlet creation form
• #3140 - Add bulk edit capability for power outlets and console server ports
• #3204 - Fix interface filtering when connecting cables
• #3207 - Fix link for connecting interface to rear port
• #3258 - Exception raised when creating/viewing a circuit with a non-connected termination

API Changes

• New API endpoints for power modeling: /api/dcim/power-panels/ and /api/dcim/power-feeds/
• New API endpoint for custom field choices: /api/extras/_custom_field_choices/
• ForeignKey fields now accept either the related object PK or a dictionary of attributes describing the related object.
• Organizational objects now include child object counts. For example, the Role serializer includes prefix_count and vlan_count.
• The id__in filter is now deprecated and will be removed in v2.7. (Begin using the ?id=1&id=2 format instead.)
• Added a description field for all device components.
• dcim.Device: The devices list endpoint now includes rendered context data.
• dcim.DeviceType: instance_count has been renamed to device_count.
• dcim.Interface: form_factor has been renamed to type. Backward compatibility for form_factor will be maintained until NetBox v2.7.
• dcim.Interface: The type filter has been renamed to kind.
• dcim.Site: The count_* read-only fields have been renamed to *_count for consistency with other objects.
• dcim.Site: Added the virtualmachine_count read-only field.
• extras.Tag: Added color and comments fields to the Tag serializer.
• virtualization.VirtualMachine: The virtual machines list endpoint now includes rendered context data.