Big fan of NetBox I'm not even sure how I'd manage modern infrastructures without it. Unless your environment happens to be very static it's a huge time sink to document a network using old fashion Visio diagrams. The initial setup of NetBox can be quite an undertaking though. As long as you secure them properly CDP/LLDP/etc make the process much easier. One general rule of advice make sure you keep good backups of your NetBox because it's easy to make changes with unintended consequences that take a lot of time to manually back out
> "The initial setup of NetBox can be quite an undertaking though. As long as you secure them properly CDP/LLDP/etc make the process much easier."
You may have good reasons, but I'll note for other readers that the NetBox documentation takes a position against doing that:
> "Serve as a "Source of Truth" - NetBox intends to represent the desired state of a network versus its operational state. As such, automated import of live network state is strongly discouraged. All data created in NetBox should first be vetted by a human to ensure its integrity. NetBox can then be used to populate monitoring and provisioning systems with a high degree of confidence." - https://docs.netbox.dev/en/stable/introduction/
and
> "ultimately the onus falls to a human operator to assert what is correct and what is not. For example, NetBox can validate the connection of a cable between two interfaces, but it cannot say whether the cable should be there." - https://docs.netbox.dev/en/stable/getting-started/planning/
Monitoring systems reflect the way your network is; ideally NetBox holds the admin side of the way your network should be - from your contracts, services, business agreements - and if the real state differs, you bring the real state into line with NetBox.
