Netbox: Contact Objects

[Bill-Irvine]

Issue type: Feature Request

This may well be out of scope for Netbox as a technical application but thought i'd gauge interest in this feature.

I find myself managing several sites with the same contact. When that contact for example changes an email address, phone number, or someone takes over their role i am updating all the sites with that contact listed.

If this is changed to a contact object that we then attach to these sites we have a central place to manage these people without duplicating the data in separate sites.

From here we could add functionality such as adding several contacts to a site (primary, secondary), we could stipulate between a business contact or a technical contact, add which company they work for, have an api get request that lists contacts for a child object such as devices (useful for managing outages and notifications).

Let me know your thoughts.

[modir]

Not only would it be useful to have several contacts for sites, but for providers as well. There we often have as well a technical contact and a business contact.

[SzymonKurowski]

I have similar business needs in my organization (multiple contacts per site). I like the approach described above.

Is there anyone who is currently working on that? I would like to offer my contribution.

[SzymonKurowski]

There is a one key point to discuss. How to deal with current contact information added to Site model.

To implement this feature it is necessary to add new model (i.e. Contact) and then if we move contact from Site to the Contact model – it will break a backward-compatibility.

For the first iteration, I would leave Site contact fields (it can be treat as a main contact to the site) and add Contact model for any specific contacts. Additionally, each contact from Contact model can refer to more than one site.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts.

[mtbutler07]

+1 For adding multiple sources for contact information for sites.

[ryanmerolle]

I say for backwards compatibility, I would implement the way in which @SzymonKurowski mentions with one alteration:

• If no legacy site contact is recorded for a site, then netbox can default to showing the new contact fields.
• If a legacy site contact is recorded for a site, netbox will show the contact with a note directing the user to the new model.

[ryanmerolle]

It would also be useful to apply the contact object relationship to:

• Sites
• Regions
• Tenants
• Manufacturers
• Providers

You could argue for contacts to be linked to devices, racks, rack groups, and etc, but that would shift this tool to more of a CMDB for everything, and I am not sure we want to do that.

[adamkf]

@ryanmerolle: I agree this relationship might be useful across multiple object relationships. We managed a couple thousand internal subnets in our org and currently use custom fields to assign ownership responsibility for given subnets (eg: Network Team, Dev Team 1, Dev Team 88, Individual Person 23, etc) so when our security group reaches out and says "who owns this infected machine" we have a starting point.

This FR has been around since 2017. Has anyone made progress toward it? I'm happy to throw my time at as we have a need internally.

[athompson-merlin]

FWIW, I don't need extended contact capabilities on Sites, but I do desperately need Contacts on Tenants instead.
Having an optional Contact[s] object attachable to every top-level object would be ideal, who knows where I might need to hang contact information someday.