The multicloud era turned network engineers into cloud detectives. It led to the waste of countless hours searching through multiple cloud consoles for clues when trouble arose in their IT environments. Frustrated by this situation, a group of network engineers inside Nutanix developed a software plugin for NetBox, a tool for managing complex IT networks.
The plug-in, initially created for internal uses, includes a model that stores data about IT system inventory. Automated “crawlers” scan public clouds on a scheduled basis to pull data into the NetBox database using the plugin's model. This combination made it quick and easy to respond to issues and optimize operations. The model “normalizes” differences between different cloud vendors, making use of a common terminology to describe objects or features that are similar in function. In 2026, the Nutanix team aims to finalize and release the model as open source code available to the NetBox community.
“In my software world, there's no higher compliment than saying that somebody has solved a non-trivial problem and this team really solved a nontrivial problem,” NetBox co-founder Mark Coleman said in an interview with The Forecast.
“It's impressive stuff.”
What started as an in-house project to ease the workloads of Nutanix’s networking engineers evolved into an open-sourced software solution for network engineers everywhere.
“Two years ago, we could see the IP address space of our on-prem system, but not for public clouds,” Danko Trajkovic, manager of network automation at Nutanix, told The Forecast.
He said the team extended visibility to infrastructure in the cloud.
“We are not blind anymore. Questions that we could answer for on-prem can now also be answered for the clouds.”
NetBox’s open-source network inventory software has become indispensable to network engineers because it creates a searchable inventory of everything on their network: servers, switches, applications, Nutanix and public cloud-based virtual machines (VMs) and so on. NetBox arose by the typical open-source path: Developers worldwide teamed up after work hours to fix problems they dealt with every day.
The network inventory saw a quantum leap in complexity with the rise of cloud services. Three Nutanix networking engineers got together and tinkered on code that evolved into a plug-in for NetBox. Fortunately, they had a global assortment of open-source NetBox developers eager to help them out.
The result is the NetBox Public Clouds Plugin, which underscores the persistent challenges of managing networks connected to the most popular cloud platforms and the enduring appeal of developing open-source software to fix these kinds of problems.
“It's amazing to see the community stepping up to do something that can really benefit for others,” Coleman said.
“Nutanix has been publishing all sorts of incredible work around the stuff they’re doing with NetBox, and this is a real highlight. I’m sure we’re going to see a lot of cool stuff come from this in the future.”
Why Multicloud Complicates Network Inventories
A few years back, network engineers overseeing an enterprise-scale hybrid multicloud estate got an urgent message from the company security team: a VM in a cloud account traced to their environment was causing a distributed denial of services (DDoS) attack.
“All they had to go on was a public IP address,” recalled Eric Pearce, formerly a Nutanix IT systems architect who was part of the Public Clouds Plugin project.
He said NetBox’s software platform would’ve easily identified the offending IP address in an on-prem environment. But solving the issue was anything but easy in the age of multicloud, which unleashed a wave of shadow IT that turned the mapping of an IP address to a VM and then to a specific owner into a drawn-out detective job.
“If people felt like they couldn't get something quickly going through normal channels, they just fired up their own personal account on the cloud provider and tried to expense it on their company credit card,” Pearce said.
Navigating through that disorder to track down a single IP address sometimes meant weeks of emails and messaging to determine which cloud provider hosted the offending VM and who owned the specific cloud account then getting the owner to respond to the problem.
Security teams couldn’t wait that long, so Nutanix’s technical teams tweaked NetBox to enable it to inventory virtual machines and other components on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
“Suddenly, we're able to see the IP address space and details of everybody's environment in the cloud — all in one place using NetBox,Now our public cloud infrastructure could be simultaneously searched and reported on alongside our on-prem physical and virtual infrastructure” Pearce added. “That was a huge win.”
Members of the NetBox community who helped Nutanix find a multicloud inventory solution couldn’t help wondering: Why not let everybody enjoy the fruits of the Nutanix engineers’ efforts?
From In-House to Open-Source Code for NetBox
Open-source software has been a mainstay of developers for decades because it frees them to quickly build things that they need without the complications (and costs) of commercial software. From Linux to Kubernetes to TensorFlow, open-source software is the foundation of a broad swath of modern technologies.
Though most techies rely on open-source software to do their jobs, they might not have hands-on experience with actively contributing to a project.
“We were newbies to open sourcing,” said Pearce.
He and his closest co-workers are experts in the nuances of designing, optimizing and managing corporate IT networks. But they’d need help turning their in-house cloud solution into a NetBox plugin.
They would rely heavily on the expertise of NetBox Labs, the organization that helps guide the development of new software solutions. The Labs experts helped them figure out how to find a company sponsor for the plugin, who helped sort out the legal details, and a security expert to scrutinize the code for potential vulnerabilities and any use of Nutanix intellectual property.
While the NetBox plugin would be a boon to Nutanix’s networking staff, it wasn’t necessarily built for typical Nutanix product customers. Even so, the company encouraged its people to contribute to the open-source community.
“Our leadership team encouraged us to try whatever we believed would work and not be scared to fail’,” said Milan Nikolic, senior network engineer at Nutanix.
“We really got the time to learn. But at the same time, it was so interesting for us that we spent weekends and nights after work doing the same kind of thing because we wanted to.”
The Enduring Value of Open-Source Development
Coleman, the NetBox co-founder, recalls the humble origins of a current cloud titan.
“AWS used to be the backend for selling books but is now its own trillion-dollar market cap business,” Coleman noted.
Similarly, generations of open-source volunteers have built helpful things that got work done without revealing immediate business value.
“There are all sorts of pockets of genius happening that aren't directly tied to how a public-facing product gets sold,” he said. Still, these efforts’ benefits accrue across the technology sector.
Coleman explained that software developers enjoy a measure of prestige from contributing to open-source projects. That can help them land better jobs with bigger companies, for instance. And it’s good for companies to support open-source projects because it makes them attractive to potential job candidates.
Moreover, developers’ gratitude for open-source products instills an urge to give back to the community. But Coleman sees something more fundamental to a software developer’s character.
“Developers have always got an itch to scratch,” he said.
“There’s a geeky enthusiasm in this space, which is probably why we see so many of these initiatives happening outside of normal work hours – because people have a deep curiosity and problem-solving energy.”
Quick Tips for Would-Be Open-Source Developers
Developing an open-source solution starts with a basic objective.
“You need some kind of vision of what you want to achieve in the end,” Nikolic of Nutanix said.
His team’s work with the Public Clouds Plugin started small and had plenty of failures before it produced successes.
“This seemingly simple act of inventorying the cloud does not have a clear “best way” to proceed. There are typically 3 or 4 different ways to accomplish this task in each cloud provider and we had to re-write a lot of code later when we ran into API usage limits or found more cost-effective approaches. We were not scared to try.”
Asking the NetBox community for help paid big dividends.
“One guy who tried something similar shared his code with us, and we had many situations like this,” Nikolic said.
It’s best to ask highly specific questions about problems you’re trying to resolve.
“Try to find people that are interested in the same thing you are,” Pearce advised. He said don’t ask questions that a quick Google or ChatGPT search can answer. Show respect for other people’s time by demonstrating that you have made some effort to resolve it on your own.
Coleman has seen many of these assistance requests unfold over the years at NetBox.
“If you come in and you say, ‘here's the thing I tried and here's the error I got,’ then you're going to get a specific response and more than likely get your problem resolved quickly.”
Read other stories in the series about the Nutanix IT team’s use of NetBox:
Tom Mangan is a contributing writer. He is a veteran B2B technology writer and editor, specializing in cloud computing and digital transformation. Contact him on his website or LinkedIn.
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