The goal of this plugin is to be able to log changes from NetBox's change log to another place (or multiple places). Since logging needs can be very custom, the plugin provides a named logger the user can configure to their specific needs.

*) The message field for change log comments added with NetBox 4.4.0 is included for installations using 4.4.0+ and omitted in prior versions.

Note: Due to the low amount of changes to the changelog codebase, the plugin may work with way older versions of NetBox, but aren't explicitly tested. If needed, make changes to the min_version accordingly.

Build package and install:

cd /path/to/repo/
python3 -m build
pip install ./dist/netbox_change2log-<ver>.tar.gz

Or install via git:

pip install git+https://github.com/tmtde/netbox-change2log.git

Configuration is split into two places, one for the plugins configuration and one for the logger itself.

To your configuration.py (or plugins.py for Docker installations) add the following:

PLUGINS.append('netbox_change2log')
PLUGINS_CONFIG['netbox_change2log'] = {}

For the PLUGIN_CONFIG the following settings can be changed

• consolidate_multiple_changes (Boolean, default False): If false, each changed attribute is output as a separate log line, otherwise all changes will appear in the same line.
• output_format: Possible values:
  • text (default): Outputs a log format {change_user} {<changed>/<created>/<deleted>} {object_name}. Change: {oldvalue} -> {newvalue} [Request: {request_id}]
  • json: Outputs the change as a json blob

Logger configuration is handled in the configuration.py configuration file from NetBox (or logging.py for a Docker installation). Add the logger netbox_change2log from this plugin to the LOGGING variable and configure to your needs.

On how to configure loggers, please see the Python Documentation on logging and the Django Logging Documentation for Django specifics. The plugins logger outputs to the INFO level.

An example configuration to log to a file:

LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': False,
    'formatters': {
        'simple': {
            'format': '[{asctime}] {message}',
            'datefmt': '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S',
            'style': '{',
        },
    },
    'handlers': {
        'change2log': {
             'formatter': 'simple',
             'class': 'logging.FileHandler',
             'filename': '/var/log/netbox_objectchange.log',
         }
    },
    'loggers': {
        'netbox_change2log': {
            'level': 'INFO',
            'handlers': ['change2log'],
        }
    }
}