Automated Network Discovery and Inventory for +600 Devices

[JessicaRigol]

I am currently documenting a company's network infrastructure and need a faster and more automated way to collect information about connected devices, since there are currently more than 600 assets including PCs, IP phones, printers, and other network devices. The goal is to automatically discover active devices and gather information such as IP address, MAC address, hostname, VLAN, and, if possible, identify the device type and the switch port where it is connected. I would like to know which tools or approaches you would recommend for this scenario, especially for automating the discovery and correlation between IP, MAC, switchport, and device type, including IP phones.

[mg1986jp]

NetBox itself doesn't do network discovery — it's a source of truth / DCIM tool, not a scanner. But you can pair it with discovery tools that push data into NetBox via its API.

For 600+ devices, I'd probably look at something like:

• Nmap + a script to parse results and push to NetBox via the REST API. Quick and dirty but works for basic IP/MAC/hostname discovery.
• NetBox Discovery plugin (there's a community one) — it uses SNMP/LLDP/CDP to discover neighbors and can auto-populate devices, interfaces, and connections.
• Nautobot has a device onboarding plugin if you're open to that ecosystem, but since you're on NetBox, the community plugin is probably your best bet.

For the SNMP-based approach, you'd walk the ARP tables and LLDP neighbor tables on your switches to get MAC, IP, hostname, and VLAN. Most of the heavy lifting is on the switch side — just make sure SNMP is enabled on your infrastructure devices.

The general flow would be: run discovery → normalize the data → POST to NetBox /api/dcim/devices/, /api/ipam/ip-addresses/, etc. The API is well documented so scripting it isn't too bad once you have the raw data.

[jeremystretch]

NetBox Discovery is available for NetBox Cloud and Enterprise. You can also deploy Diode for the community edition.