u/jxwbr

Hello fellow redditor,

I'm looking for some best-practice ideas on how to handle initial network discovery and ongoing inventory reconciliation with NetBox.

I understand that NetBox should be the source of truth and not simply mirror whatever is currently discovered on the network.

However, when initially setting up NetBox, manually adding every existing device seems quite time-consuming. Ideally, I'd like to use some kind of discovery process (SNMP, Nmap, LLDP/CDP, APIs, etc.) to discover existing devices and use that data to build the initial inventory.

For ongoing operations, I was thinking about running discovery periodically, comparing the discovered state against NetBox, and then reviewing the differences manually before making any changes to the NetBox inventory.

Something like:

Network Discovery

Compare with NetBox

Review differences

Update NetBox

Has anyone implemented a workflow like this in practice?

I'm especially interested in what tools/scripts/plugins you use for discovery and comparison, and whether this approach works well for a small IT team.

Thanks in advance :D