website/docs/PRODUCT.md

netOrk — Product Description

One-liner

netOrk is a self-hosted network orchestration platform that discovers, monitors, and manages heterogeneous network infrastructure from a single UI.

Elevator Pitch (3 sentences)

netOrk connects to your routers, switches, access points, firewalls, and servers via NAPALM and custom vendor drivers — regardless of manufacturer. It continuously polls device state, detects configuration drift, and lets you push corrections in one click. All findings are synced to NetBox as the source of truth, and security integrations with Wazuh and Graylog give you visibility across the full stack.

---

Target Audience

Primary: Network engineers and IT administrators managing small to medium heterogeneous environments (10–500 devices) — mixed vendor, mixed OS.

Secondary: Serious homelab operators who run "prosumer" or enterprise-grade hardware and want operational visibility beyond what consumer dashboards offer.

Pain points this solves:

• Multiple vendor-specific management UIs open at once
• No single view of "what's running where"
• Config changes made directly on devices — nobody knows what changed
• Manual SSH into every device to check interface status or VLAN membership
• Security tooling (Wazuh agents, syslog) not consistently deployed

---

Value Propositions

1. One UI for everything — OpenWRT APs, OPNsense firewalls, HP ProCurve switches, Proxmox hosts, Linux servers, Fritz!Boxes, NAS devices, and more, all managed in one place.

2. Intent-based configuration — Define desired state in netOrk (VLAN names, SSID settings, AP radio profiles). netOrk pushes the config to devices and corrects drift automatically or on demand.

3. Automatic drift detection — Every poll compares device config against the DB. Drifted devices get a warning; a one-click fix stream applies the correction via SSH/UCI/REST and shows live output.

4. Scheduled automation — Automatic reboots for OpenWRT APs (GTK key rotation workaround), scheduled config fixes, package updates — all with time windows and per-site concurrency limits.

5. Security visibility — Wazuh agent tracking with CVE counts and alert history per device. Graylog syslog forwarding status and auto-fix. CrowdSec org-level threat summary per device.

6. Deep NetBox integration — Devices, interfaces, IP addresses, prefixes, VLANs synced to NetBox automatically. netOrk uses NetBox as the canonical documentation target.

7. Plugin system — Integrations (Wazuh, Graylog, CrowdSec, apt-cacher-ng) are plugins that can be enabled/disabled per deployment. Adding a new integration follows a documented pattern.

8. Self-hosted, no SaaS — Runs in Docker Compose. Your data stays on your infrastructure. No telemetry, no cloud dependency.

9. NIS2 evidence foundation — NIS2 Art. 21 mandates asset inventory, patch management, access control, and audit trails. netOrk produces all of these as day-to-day operational outputs: full device inventory, per-device update status, Wazuh CVE tracking, EOL firmware/OS flagging, RBAC with MFA, Git-backed config snapshots with diff/restore, config drift detection, and a complete audit log.

10. Build your own view — Configurable, shareable dashboards: pick from 13 widgets, arrange them on a WYSIWYG grid, and share the result with colleagues who can subscribe to the live version or clone their own copy.

11. From zero to managed in one flow — Provision a Cloud-Init VM on a Proxmox hypervisor, assign Ansible roles to configure it, and netOrk auto-links it as a Device — no separate tools, no manual SSH-and-copy.

12. Reach sites netOrk can't touch directly — Deploy a lightweight Satellite agent to poll devices locally at a disconnected or firewalled site and sync results back over HTTPS; scheduled fixes route through it the same way they do for directly reachable devices.

---

Feature List

Device Management

• CRUD for devices with credential profiles and SSH key management
• Per-device poll intervals (minutes) or manual-only
• Status tracking: planned / staged / active / decommissioning / offline / disabled
• Vendor/model/OS auto-populated from NAPALM get_facts()
• Site assignment with FK to structured Site records
• AP Profile assignment for grouped OpenWRT config

Discovery

• ICMP ping sweep, SNMP scan, HTTP/HTTPS probing
• Device fingerprinting: vendor + platform confidence scoring
• FQDN resolution (reverse DNS)
• Manual adoption from scan results (no auto-create to avoid inventory noise)

VM Provisioning

• Cloud-Init based VM creation directly from a hypervisor's VMs tab — no manual template or VMID setup
• Multi-distro image catalog: Debian 12, Ubuntu 22.04/24.04/26.04, Fedora 42/43/44, with Ubuntu and Fedora releases synced automatically as new versions ship
• Pick a target VLAN and an IP from its subnet — netOrk creates the DHCP reservation automatically
• Cloud-init provisions a real Linux user with an SSH key, plus configurable bootstrap toggles (SNMP, QEMU guest agent)
• Reusable provisioning templates for repeatable bootstrap settings
• The new VM is auto-linked as a netOrk Device and its hostname assigned to a DNS zone once bootstrap finishes
• Deploy progress shown as a live step checklist in the UI
• Delete a VM and its linked netOrk Device together, gated behind a name-confirmation prompt

Supported Device Drivers

Custom NAPALM drivers for all of the following:

Driver	Device type
openwrt	OpenWRT access points
opnsense	OPNsense firewalls
proxmox	Proxmox VE hypervisors
linux	Generic Linux servers
procurve	HP ProCurve / Aruba switches
tplink_jetstream	TP-Link Jetstream managed switches
netgear	Netgear switches
fritzbox	AVM Fritz!Box routers
zyxel	Zyxel switches
openmediavault	OpenMediaVault NAS
sonos	Sonos speakers

Plus all built-in NAPALM drivers: Cisco IOS/IOS-XE/NX-OS, Arista EOS, Juniper JunOS.

Networking & Inventory

• Interface browser with IPv4/IPv6 addresses, MAC, speed, MTU
• LLDP neighbor discovery and topology graph
• ARP table and DHCP lease browser per device
• Subnet browser with interface-to-subnet assignments
• VLAN list grouped by site; per-VLAN device membership view
• SSID management with push to OpenWRT APs via UCI
• Per-SSID MAC access control lists (whitelist / blacklist) pushed to every AP broadcasting the SSID, quick-add straight from the Connected Clients list
• MAC ACL state is a first-class drift item — covered by the same drift detection, scheduled auto-fix, and warning aggregation as any other config drift
• Dedicated Access Control Lists tab on the Wireless page listing every SSID with its ACL editor inline

Configuration Management

• Config drift detection: desired state (DB) vs device state (poll snapshot)
• One-click drift fix stream with live SSH output in the browser
• UCI-based config push for OpenWRT (VLAN names, SSID settings, radio config)
• AP profile system: country code, HT/VHT mode, 802.11r, NTP, syslog, SSH port
• Configuration backup & versioning: every poll captures a config snapshot into a local Git repository, with full history and a side-by-side diff viewer between any two points in time
• One-click config restore for OPNsense from any prior snapshot
• Unauthorised configuration changes are surfaced as a device warning
• netOrk's own config pushes (drift fixes, ACL provisioning) are recognized and auto-accepted as the new baseline — never mistaken for an unauthorized change

Configuration Automation (Ansible)

• Reusable Ansible roles and playbooks stored and edited directly in netOrk — no separate git checkout
• 11 built-in roles ready to assign: base, ubuntu, docker, adguard, zoraxy, portainer, watchtower, uptime-kuma, vaultwarden, wireguard, fail2ban
• Automatic dependency resolution — assigning docker pulls in base automatically, no manual role ordering
• Built-in roles can't be deleted but are fully editable; customizations survive upgrades, and only untouched files auto-heal on bugfixes
• ansible-doc-backed autocomplete while writing roles and playbooks
• Upload your own role as an archive
• Device-level role assignment with a dedicated Ansible tab on the device detail page
• Run history per device, snapshotting the exact role/playbook content that was executed
• Wired into VM provisioning: assign roles at VM-creation time and they run automatically after boot

Scheduled Operations

• Scheduled reboots for OpenWRT APs with per-site concurrency lock
• Failback cron script written to device for netOrk-unreachable scenarios
• Scheduled config drift fixes with time-window enforcement
• Package update scheduling and one-click apply
• Wake-on-LAN via a firewall's driver (OPNsense today) — saved WOL targets with on-demand "Wake now" and recurring schedules; save a seen host as a target directly from the DHCP/ARP tabs

Satellite Deployments

• Lightweight Docker agent deployed at a site netOrk can't reach directly — polls devices locally and syncs results back to Central over HTTPS
• Deployed in one flow via VM provisioning: pick a hypervisor and site, netOrk provisions the VM and installs the satellite container automatically
• Central automatically skips direct polling for any device at a site with an online, heartbeating satellite — no manual per-site toggling
• Scheduled/on-demand reboots and the SNMP auto-fix flow run through the same command channel whether a device is directly reachable or behind a satellite
• Discovery jobs at a satellite-covered site scan locally through the same command channel, instead of failing to reach the subnet from Central
• Not yet satellite-covered: SNMP health-metric polling still runs from Central, and WebSSH console access isn't available through a satellite

Monitoring & Health

• SNMP health metrics (CPU, memory, interface counters) via get_health_metrics()
• Per-device warning system with severity levels (error / warning / info)
• One-click Ack on any warning — clears it immediately and writes an audit log entry; for config-change warnings the current state is accepted as the new baseline
• Docker container and image status (Proxmox/Linux)
• Service status and start/stop/restart (systemd)
• VM/container list with OS device cross-linking (Proxmox)
• Per-device availability windows — suppress OFFLINE status and poll-failure warnings during expected downtime (e.g. a nightly power-off); opt-in, unconfigured devices are unaffected
• OPNsense: BGP neighbor status polling and display, with a peer-down warning
• OPNsense: TLS certificate monitoring for the Trust store, with expiring-soon / expired warnings
• OPNsense: Dynamic DNS service-down warning (os-ddclient)

Dashboards

• Configurable, shareable dashboards — build your own from a widget picker instead of a fixed layout
• WYSIWYG grid-layout editor: drag, resize, and arrange widgets on a canvas
• 13 widget types: stats, device warnings, recently updated devices, network topology, EOL status, config drift summary, Wazuh security alerts, audit log activity, discovery jobs status, upcoming scheduled actions, DNS zones overview, site overview, config snapshot history
• Multi-instance widgets with independent per-widget settings
• Share a dashboard with specific users; recipients can subscribe to the owner's live version or clone it into their own editable copy
• Favorite dashboards for quick access from the main menu; set any dashboard as your home view

Security Integrations (plugins)

• Wazuh — agent enrollment tracking, vulnerability counts (by severity), recent alert history, CIS benchmark scores, one-click agent install fix stream
• Graylog — rsyslog forwarding status per device, one-click fix to write rule
• CrowdSec — org-level decisions, remediation metrics, top attack scenarios
• EOL Tracking — flags devices running end-of-life or soon-to-be-end-of-life firmware/OS via the endoflife.date API, checked daily

DNS

• DNS zone management with authoritative device assignment
• Forward record provisioning (A records from device interfaces)
• PTR record provisioning to reverse zones
• Pending job queue for zone changes when device is unreachable

RADIUS Management

• Global FreeRADIUS server, NAS client, and user management — no site scoping, usable from any site's SSIDs/APs
• Changes push to the device via the driver and are only stored after the device confirms — avoids drift between netOrk's view and the actual FreeRADIUS config
• Dedicated server list and detail page (NAS clients / users tabs) under the Wireless section
• SSID 802.1X integration (auto-provisioning a NAS client from an SSID's RADIUS server) is a deliberate follow-up, not included yet

Access Control

• JWT authentication with remember-me (localStorage) or session-only (sessionStorage)
• Two-factor authentication (MFA/TOTP) — authenticator app at login, backup codes for emergencies, session invalidation on TOTP changes, enforceable per role
• RBAC with four built-in roles: viewer / operator / engineer / administrator
• Custom roles with any permission combination
• Full audit log of all orchestration actions, filterable by date range, user, action, or resource — export to CSV or PDF

NetBox Sync

• Pushes vendor, model, OS version, status to NetBox dcim.devices
• Syncs interfaces, IP addresses, prefixes, VLANs
• VM interfaces and disks for Proxmox hosts

Developer / Operator Experience

• OpenAPI / Swagger at /docs
• Plugin system: new integrations follow a documented pattern
• Celery task queue with dedicated queues per workload type
• Docker Compose deployment (single command)
• Alembic migrations run automatically on deploy

---

Architecture in One Paragraph

netOrk runs as a set of Docker containers: a FastAPI API server, three Celery worker pools (general, poll, and Ansible), a Celery Beat scheduler, and an nginx UI server. Redis is the broker. PostgreSQL stores all state. Device communication is always blocking I/O executed in Celery workers — FastAPI request handlers are async-only for DB and quick operations. Custom NAPALM drivers live in vendor/ as editable packages and self-register via @register_driver. The plugin system (netork/plugins/) provides a hook bus, a plugin registry with enable/disable state in the DB, and a documented pattern for adding integrations. For sites Central can't reach directly, a separate Satellite container polls devices locally and syncs results back over HTTPS; Central dispatches actions (reboots, SNMP fixes) to it through a generic command channel, transparently to the UI.