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NetBox and Zabbix: Creating the Ultimate Source of Truth for Your IT Infrastructure
By Dimitri Bellini29 October, 2025Blog

NetBox and Zabbix: Creating the Ultimate Source of Truth for Your IT Infrastructure

Good morning everyone! Dimitri Bellini here, and welcome back to Quadrata, my channel dedicated to the world of open source and all the IT that I, and hopefully you, find fascinating.

This week, we’re diving into a powerful solution that addresses a common and persistent challenge in IT management: the lack of a single, reliable source of information. In large infrastructures, it’s often difficult to know what objects exist, where they are, what their relationships are, and how to even begin monitoring them. Many turn to a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), but keeping it manually updated is a struggle. What if we could automate this process?

That’s where a fantastic open-source project called NetBox comes in. And thanks to our friends at Open Source ICT Solutions, there’s a brilliant integration that connects it directly to Zabbix. Let’s explore how to build a true “source of truth” for our network.

What is NetBox and Why Do You Need It?

For those who may not know it, NetBox is a well-established and solid open-source tool designed to be the central repository for your entire IT environment. It’s more than just a spreadsheet; it’s a structured database for everything from your network devices to your data center cabling. It’s designed to be the single source of truth.

NetBox helps you model and document your infrastructure with incredible detail. Its core functionalities include:

  • IP Address Management (IPAM): A robust module for managing all your IP spaces, prefixes, and addresses.

  • Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM): Model your physical infrastructure, including data center layouts, rack elevations, and the exact placement of devices within them.

  • Cabling and Connections: Document and visualize every cable connection between your devices, allowing you to trace the entire path of a circuit.

  • Automation and Integration: With a powerful REST API and support for custom scripts, NetBox is built for automation, allowing you to streamline processes and integrate with other tools—like Zabbix!

While maintaining this level of documentation might seem daunting, the benefits are immense, especially when you can automate parts of the workflow.

The NetBox-Zabbix Integration: How It Works

The concept behind this integration is simple yet crucial to understand. The flow of information is one-way: from NetBox to Zabbix.

This is fundamental. NetBox acts as the source of truth, the master record. When you add or update a device in NetBox, the plugin provisions that device in Zabbix. It creates the host, assigns templates, sets up interfaces, and applies tags. It is not Zabbix sending information back to NetBox. This ensures your documentation remains the authoritative source.

I got all my inspiration for this setup from a fantastic blog post on Zabbix.com by the team at Open Source ICT Solutions. They created this plugin and provided an excellent guide, so a huge thank you to them!

Getting Started: A Step-by-Step Guide

For my setup, I wanted to simplify things, so I used a non-official Docker repository designed for NetBox plugin development. It makes getting up and running much faster.

H3: Setting Up the Environment

Here are the commands I used to get the environment ready:

# 1. Clone the unofficial Docker repo for NetBox plugin development

> git clone https://github.com/dkraklan/netbox-plugin-development-env.git

> cd netbox-plugin-development-env



# 2. Clone the nbxsync plugin from OpensourceICTSolutions into the plugins directory

> cd plugins/

> git clone https://github.com/OpensourceICTSolutions/nbxsync.git

> cd ..



# 3. Add the plugin to the NetBox configuration

> vi configuration/configuration.py



# Add 'nbxsync' to the PLUGINS list:

PLUGINS = [

    'nbxsync'

]



# 4. Build and launch the Docker containers

> docker-compose build

> docker-compose up -d

And just like that, you should have a running NetBox instance with the Zabbix plugin installed!

Configuring the Zabbix Plugin in NetBox

Once NetBox is up, the configuration is straightforward.

  1. Add Your Zabbix Server: In the NetBox UI, you’ll see a new “Zabbix” menu at the bottom. Navigate there and add your Zabbix server. You’ll need to provide a name, the server URL (just the base URL, e.g., http://zabbix.example.com), and an API token from a Zabbix user with sufficient permissions.

  2. Sync Templates: After adding the server, you can click “Sync Templates.” The plugin will connect to your Zabbix instance and pull in all available templates, proxies, macros, and host groups. This is incredibly useful for later steps.

  3. Define Your Infrastructure: Before adding a device, you need to define some core components in NetBox. This is standard NetBox procedure:

    • Create a Site (e.g., your main office or data center).

    • Define a Manufacturer (e.g., Cisco).

    • Create a Device Role (e.g., Core Switch).

    • Create a Device Type, which is a specific model (e.gne., Cisco CBS350-24P). Here, you can go to the “Zabbix” tab and pre-assign a default Zabbix template for this device type, which is a huge time-saver!

Provisioning a New Device to Zabbix

Now for the magic. Let’s add a new switch and watch it appear in Zabbix.

  1. Create the Device: Create a new device in NetBox, assigning the Site, Device Role, and Device Type you created earlier.

  2. Add an IP Address: Go to the IPAM section and create an IP address that you will assign to the switch’s management interface.

  3. Configure the Zabbix Interface: Navigate back to your newly created device and click on the “Zabbix” tab.

    • Add a Host Interface. Select your Zabbix server, the interface type (e.g., SNMP), and assign the IP address you just created.

    • Add a Host Group. Assign the Zabbix host group where you want this device to appear.

    • Add any Tags you want. I created a “netbox” tag for easy identification.

  4. Sync to Zabbix: With all the information in place, simply click the “Sync to Zabbix” button. A background job will be queued.

If you switch over to your Zabbix frontend, you’ll see the new host has been created automatically, complete with the correct IP address, assigned to the right host group, linked to the correct template, and with the tags we defined. It’s that simple!

Even better, the integration also pulls some data back for viewing. In the “Zabbix Operation” tab within NetBox, you can see the latest problems for that specific device directly from Zabbix, giving you a unified view without leaving the NetBox interface.

Final Thoughts

I have to say, this is a truly impressive product. Of course, it requires a disciplined workflow to maintain the data in NetBox, but the payoff in consistency, automation, and having a single, reliable source of truth is enormous. From one dashboard, you can control your entire documented infrastructure and its monitoring configuration.

This project is actively developed, and the community is already making requests on GitHub. If you have ideas for new features or find any bugs, I encourage you to contribute. This is a tool that can be incredibly useful for anyone managing a Zabbix instance, from a small lab to a large server farm.

That’s all for today! I hope you found this overview interesting. It’s a powerful combination that can really level up your infrastructure management game.

What do you think? Have you used NetBox before? Let me know your thoughts on this integration in the comments below. As always, if you enjoyed the video and this post, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already. See you next week!

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Back from Zabbix Summit: An Exclusive Look at the Future with Zabbix 8.0 LTS
By Dimitri Bellini22 October, 2025Blog

Back from Zabbix Summit: An Exclusive Look at the Future with Zabbix 8.0 LTS

Good morning everyone, Dimitri Bellini here! It’s great to be back with you on Quadrata, my channel dedicated to the world of open source and IT. It’s been a little while since my last video, as I’ve been quite busy traveling between the Zabbix Summit in Riga and Gitex in Dubai. The energy at the Summit was incredible, and I returned not just with great memories but with a clear vision of the future of monitoring. And today, I want to share that vision with you.

So, grab a coffee, and let’s dive into a recap of the fantastic Zabbix Summit and, more importantly, the groundbreaking features coming in the next major release: Zabbix 8.0 LTS.

The Zabbix Summit Experience: A Global Community United

This year’s Zabbix Summit in Riga, Latvia, was special. Not only did it mark the 20th anniversary of Zabbix, but it brought together a massive, passionate community from all corners of the globe—from Japan to South America to the Middle East. It’s always amazing to connect with so many people, share use cases, and discuss what we all love about Zabbix.

We had the chance to tour the new Zabbix headquarters—a beautiful, modern space with floors dedicated to development, support, and commercial teams. I even had the pleasure of presenting a use case with my colleague Francesco, which was a fantastic experience. But the main event, the moment we were all waiting for, was Alexey Vladyshev’s keynote on what’s next for Zabbix.

The Main Event: What’s Coming in Zabbix 8.0 LTS

Zabbix 8.0 is the next Long-Term Support (LTS) release, which means it’s designed for enterprise environments that need stability and support for up to five years. This release isn’t just an incremental update; it’s a monumental leap forward, addressing many of the current limitations and pushing Zabbix firmly into the realm of a full-fledged observability platform.

Let’s break down the most exciting pillars of this upcoming release.

Revolutionizing Event Management with Complex Event Processing (CEP)

One of the biggest game-changers is the introduction of a native Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine. This is designed to drastically reduce monitoring noise and help us focus on the root cause of issues, not just the symptoms. The CEP will operate on two levels:

  • Single Event Processing: This allows for fine-grained control over individual events as they come in. We’ll be able to perform operations like filtering irrelevant events, normalizing data to a standard format, manipulating tags and severity on the fly, and even anonymizing sensitive information.

  • Multiple Event Processing: This is where the real magic happens. By analyzing events over specific time windows, Zabbix will be able to perform advanced correlation, deduplicate redundant alerts, and distinguish between a root cause and its resulting symptoms.

Best of all, we’ll be able to implement custom logic using JavaScript. Imagine enriching an incoming event with data from your CMDB before it even becomes a problem in Zabbix. The possibilities are endless!

Embracing Observability: APM and OpenTelemetry Integration

Zabbix is officially stepping into the world of Application Performance Monitoring (APM). To do this, it’s fundamentally changing how it handles data. Instead of simple time-series data, Zabbix 8.0 will be built to handle complex, structured JSON data natively.

This architectural shift opens the door for seamless integration with modern observability standards like OpenTelemetry. We will finally be able to ingest traces, logs, and metrics from applications directly into Zabbix and visualize them. During the presentation, we saw a mockup of a request trace, broken down step-by-step, allowing for deep root cause analysis right within the Zabbix UI. This is a massive step forward.

A New Engine for Unprecedented Scale

With all this new data, how will Zabbix scale? While standard databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL will still be supported for smaller setups, the focus for large-scale deployments is shifting to high-performance backends. The star of the show here is ClickHouse.

The new architecture will offload the ingestion process to Zabbix Proxies, which will write data directly to ClickHouse. The Zabbix Server will then query this data for visualization and processing. This design allows Zabbix to handle millions of values per second, making it suitable for even the most demanding environments.

A Fresh Face and Enhanced Usability

Let’s be honest, the Zabbix UI, while functional, could use a modern touch. The Zabbix team knows this, and a complete UI overhaul is planned for 8.0! We saw mockups of a cleaner, fresher, and more intuitive interface.

But perhaps one of the most requested features of all time is finally coming: customizable table views. In the “Problems” view and other tables, you will be able to show, hide, reorder, and sort columns as you see fit. It might seem like a small change, but it’s a huge quality-of-life improvement that we’ve been waiting for.

Monitoring on the Go: The Official Zabbix Mobile App

Finally, Zabbix is developing an official mobile application! This will bring essential monitoring capabilities right to your phone, including:

  • Push notifications for alerts.

  • Problem management and collaboration tools.

  • Aggregated views from multiple Zabbix servers.

  • Integration with both on-premise and Zabbix Cloud instances.

A Glimpse into the Future

Zabbix 8.0 LTS is shaping up to be the most significant release in the product’s 20-year history. It’s evolving from a best-in-class monitoring tool into a comprehensive observability platform ready to meet the challenges of modern IT infrastructures. The expected release date is around mid-2026, and I, for one, cannot wait.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on the public roadmap and will keep you updated as these features move through development. But now, I want to hear from you!

What feature are you most excited about? Is there something else you’d love to see in Zabbix? Let me know in the comments below!

That’s all for today. Thanks for joining me, and I’ll see you in the next video. Bye everyone!

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Unleashing Your Inner Artist: A Deep Dive into AI Image Generation with ComfyUI
By Dimitri Bellini01 October, 2025Blog

Unleashing Your Inner Artist: A Deep Dive into AI Image Generation with ComfyUI

Good morning, everyone! Dimitri Bellini here, back on my channel, Quadrata, where we explore the fascinating world of open source and IT. If you’ve been following along, you know we’ve spent a lot of time diving into Large Language Models (LLMs) for tasks like summarizing topics and answering questions. But today, we’re venturing into a different, more visual side of artificial intelligence: the creation of images.

We’re going to explore a powerful, node-based graphical interface called ComfyUI. This open-source tool allows you to build sophisticated workflows for generating AI images using Stable Diffusion models. Forget complex code; we’re talking about a visual playground for your creativity.

LLMs vs. Stable Diffusion: Understanding the AI Playground

Before we jump into ComfyUI, it’s crucial to understand the two different families of AI models we’re dealing with. They might both fall under the “AI” umbrella, but they function in fundamentally different ways.

Large Language Models (LLMs)

Think of models like GPT-4, Google Gemini, or Llama. Their world is text.

  • Purpose: To generate human-like text, answer questions, translate languages, and even write code.

  • How it works: At its core, an LLM is a master of prediction. It analyzes a sequence of words and predicts the most statistically probable next word to continue the sentence or paragraph. We can think of it as a super-intelligent person who excels at writing and conversation.

  • Tools: We often use engines like Ollama to run these models locally.

Stable Diffusion Models

This category is all about visuals. Models like Stable Diffusion 1.5 or the powerful Flux.1 are designed to be digital artists.

  • Purpose: To create complex, detailed images based on text descriptions (prompts).

  • How it works: The process is fascinating. It starts with a canvas of pure random noise—like the static on an old TV. Then, guided by your text prompt, the model gradually removes the noise (a process called denoising diffusion), adding details step-by-step until a coherent image emerges. It’s like an artist taking our instructions and sculpting a masterpiece from a block of marble.

  • Tools: This is where ComfyUI shines, providing the framework to control this artistic process.

Introducing ComfyUI: Your Visual Gateway to AI Art

So, why do we need a tool like ComfyUI? Because creating the perfect image isn’t always straightforward. ComfyUI provides a graphical interface that transforms the complex process of AI image generation into a manageable, visual workflow.

Why a Node-Based Interface?

Instead of writing lines of code, you connect different functional blocks, or “nodes,” together. Each node performs a specific task—loading a model, defining a prompt, sampling the image, upscaling the result, etc. You connect the output of one node to the input of another, creating a visual pipeline. This modular approach gives you incredible flexibility and granular control over every single step of the image generation process.

My Setup: Docker and NVIDIA Power

To keep things clean and avoid dependency headaches with Python versions, I prefer to run everything in a Docker container. For this demonstration, I’m using a fantastic community-built Docker image for ComfyUI (I’ll leave the link in my YouTube video description!). The heavy lifting is handled by my NVIDIA RTX 8000 GPU, which is essential for getting results in a reasonable amount of time.

A Practical Tour: 3 Amazing Things You Can Do with ComfyUI

Talk is cheap, so let’s dive into some practical examples to see what ComfyUI is capable of. I’ve set up a few different workflows to showcase its power.

1. Breathing Life into Old Photos: Upscaling with AI

First up, let’s tackle a common problem: low-resolution images. I took a tiny photo, just 300×345 pixels. By running it through an upscaling workflow in ComfyUI, I was able to increase its size by four times while adding incredible detail. When you zoom in on the original, it’s a blurry mess. But the upscaled version is sharp and clear. The AI didn’t just enlarge the pixels; it intelligently interpreted the image to add detail that wasn’t there before. It’s not perfect, as a better model would yield even cleaner results, but the difference is still night and day.

2. From Black and White to Vibrant Color: AI Colorization

Next, I took a classic black-and-white still from the historic film Metropolis. The image is iconic but lacks the vibrancy of color. Using a specific colorization model, ComfyUI analyzed the image and made an educated guess about the original colors. The result is a beautifully colored image that brings a whole new dimension to the scene. This is an amazing tool for restoring and reimagining historical photos and videos.

3. Text to Reality: Generating Images from Scratch

This is the most common use case and where the magic really happens. I used the Flux.1 Schnell model, an open-source powerhouse, to generate an image from a simple text prompt: “a computer technician with his penguin next to him in a server room.”

Watching the process is captivating. ComfyUI’s interface shows you which node is currently working, and you can see your system’s resource usage spike. My GPU hit 100%, and VRAM usage climbed to nearly 40 GB! After a few moments, the result appeared: a stunningly detailed, high-quality image of a technician and his penguin companion. Just a year ago, achieving this level of quality with open-source models at home was almost impossible. Today, it’s a reality.

Final Thoughts and Your Turn to Create

ComfyUI is an incredibly rich and powerful tool that puts professional-grade AI image generation into your hands. I’ll be honest—there’s a learning curve. The sheer number of nodes and settings can be intimidating at first. But the ability to build, customize, and share workflows makes it one of the most versatile platforms out there.

With a solution that is completely open source, you can have your own AI art studio running directly at home. I highly encourage you to give it a try. Play around with it, download different models, and see what you can create!

On a final note, I’ll be heading to the Zabbix Summit in Riga next week, so I might not be able to post a full video. However, I’m excited to discover the new features coming in Zabbix 8.0 and will be sure to share the highlights with you all!

What do you think? Have you tried ComfyUI or other Stable Diffusion tools? What kind of images would you like to create? Let me know in the comments below! Your feedback helps shape future content.

A big greeting from me, Dimitri, and see you next week!

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