NetBox Labs, the commercial steward of the open-source NetBox project, has built a comprehensive platform around NetBox for network and infrastructure management. Today, the company is announcing the general availability of NetBox Copilot, an AI agent that sits inside the NetBox platform and enables organizations to interact with the NetBox data in natural language and drive change in the network autonomously.
NetBox, which is marking its 10th anniversary, is described as the system of record for networks and infrastructure, much like Salesforce for sales teams or HubSpot for marketing. It’s used by IT operations, enterprise networking, and data center teams to manage the infrastructure. The core product is open source, originating from DigitalOcean, and has become pervasive across organizations with large, scaled infrastructures.
Part of the reason that IT operations teams have been slow to utilize AIOps is that network engineers aren’t usually software developers, so many areas of IT that could be automated have not been due to that knowledge gap. By introducing a natural language interface with NetBox Copilot, the barrier to automation has been dramatically lowered.
NetBox Labs co-founder Kris Beevers explained that NetBox is “roughly a knowledge graph of, here’s what is in my infrastructure. Here are the relationships between elements of my infrastructure. Here’s what’s changing, like all of that kind of context that is really important to enable agents, or humans even to do their job.” NetBox Copilot, he said, is the layering on of intelligence above that, leveraging NetBox’s inventory and relationship data so agents can operate with accurate, context-rich information, which reduces the “garbage in, garbage out” problem.
Beevers said NetBox Labs sees three classes of AI agents, starting with connective agents (using MCP server). “A year ago, we brought our MCP server to market to help connect the agent ecosystem to the data,” he said. Next, he said, are interactive agents (Copilot). “Copilot is kind of that natural language interaction to do those investigative workflows or drive change in your infrastructure and agents to enable you to do that.” The third class is future autonomouos agents. “This is where I think this is all headed. pretty quickly,” Beevers said. “Agents that just operate on their own, triggered by things that are happening in your infrastructure, or triggered by the use of the interactive Copilot, like ‘Every time somebody adds a new switch to the network, do these five things. And now you have an autonomous agent in that background, and where we think the industry is headed.”
NetBox Copilot interactive agents can handle issues such as creating remediation workflows when the network is down, or it can manage all the data and configuration when asked to spin up a new site, and building automation, tooling and scripts, Beevers said. Other workflows he gave as examples include calculating the depreciation of a data center before planning a network refresh, or how much to budget for an equipment refresh. “These are the kinds of workflows we’re seeing,” he said, offering a sense of what the Copilot product is.
Strategic Partnership with WWT
The company also announced today a strategic partnership with WWT (World Wide Technology), a systems integrator and a major hardware reseller. WWT has incorporated the NetBox Labs platform into its reference architecture for all its automation projects. This positions the NetBox Labs platform as a “core underpinning” of WWT’s automation practice, advising enterprise-class customers in sectors like financial services and manufacturing on the necessary software stack for their move to a fully automated environment. Bill Lapcevic, co-founder and chief revenue officer at NetBox Labs, said, “Enterprise class customers like banks and other financial services, manufacturing, they rely on companies like WWT to help guide them in terms of the software stack that they’ll use to manage that infrastructure and manage the automation process, plus all the best practices, guidance and expertise necessary to do the organizational change around this new fully automated way of doing things. So pretty much every time their automation practice goes into a business and says, we’d like to do a big automation practice with you, the first thing they’ll do is to say and you’re going to put NetBox Labs platform in place so that we can actually do the things we need to do to make you successful.”
