Skip to content

Tenancy

Most core objects within NetBox's data model support tenancy. This is the association of an object with a particular tenant to convey ownership or dependency. For example, an enterprise might represent its internal business units as tenants, whereas a managed services provider might create a tenant in NetBox to represent each of its customers.

flowchart TD
    TenantGroup --> TenantGroup & Tenant
    Tenant --> Site & Device & Prefix & Circuit & ...

click Tenant "../../models/tenancy/tenant/"
click TenantGroup "../../models/tenancy/tenantgroup/"

Tenant Groups

Tenants can be grouped by any logic that your use case demands, and groups can be nested recursively for maximum flexibility. For example, You might define a parent "Customers" group with child groups "Current" and "Past" within it. A tenant can be assigned to a group at any level within the hierarchy.

Tenants

Typically, the tenant model is used to represent a customer or internal organization, however it can be used for whatever purpose meets your needs.

Most core objects within NetBox can be assigned to particular tenant, so this model provides a very convenient way to correlate ownership across object types. For example, each of your customers might have its own racks, devices, IP addresses, circuits and so on: These can all be easily tracked via tenant assignment.

The following objects can be assigned to tenants:

  • Sites
  • Racks
  • Rack reservations
  • Devices
  • VRFs
  • Prefixes
  • IP addresses
  • VLANs
  • Circuits
  • Clusters
  • Virtual machines

Tenant assignment is used to signify the ownership of an object in NetBox. As such, each object may only be owned by a single tenant. For example, if you have a firewall dedicated to a particular customer, you would assign it to the tenant which represents that customer. However, if the firewall serves multiple customers, it doesn't belong to any particular customer, so tenant assignment would not be appropriate.