Circuit Redundancy Groups

[tardoe]

NetBox version

v2.11.12

Feature type

New functionality

Proposed functionality

This proposal adds a new model for defining the relationship between circuits to track a designed redundancy between them.

A Circuit Redundancy Group (CRG) should contain two or more circuits that provide redundancy to one another. For example, two circuits exist from A to B, when added as members of a CRG, it is then easy to determine the impact of various failure scenarios. Optionally, circuits can be given a priority to indicate their primary, secondary, tertiary etc. status within the group.

Use case

A common use case is for dual circuits between two sites or devices. E.g.:

NYC1 -- DAL1 (provider A)
   |      |
NYC2 -- DAL2 (provider B)

In this case the two circuits linking DAL and NYC sites would be added to the same CRG to indicate they protect each other. One of the most useful example use-cases for this information might be evaluating maintenance notifications. If both circuits have overlapping maintenance events, the user would know to expect an outage. These types of scenarios could be determined well ahead of time given the designed redundancy is documented.

Database changes

An addition of a CRG model and any associated models required to track a many-to-many relationship between CRG and Circuit. It might also be worth considering CRG nesting (similar to how Locations models operate) where redundancy design are more complicated.

External dependencies

None

[tardoe]

Having given this some further thought, we can likely add a field titled "minimum circuits" to the CRG model to indicate the minimum number of circuits required to call the CRG "healthy". This will enable a few use cases such as:

• CRGs with more than two parallel links where more than two are required at any one time.
• Circuits that are related but cannot be modelled with terminations such as back-to-back connected circuits in uncontrolled spaces (e.g. a long-haul circuit and a last-mile circuit that are directly connected without a device in between) that would be considered a single logical circuit. This would have a "minimum circuits" value of 2 in this case - meaning both are required.
• Nesting can be used to group these back-to-back CRGs (as above) with other single-circuits that provide redundancy to on-another.

[github-actions]

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[jeremystretch]

After revisiting this, it needs a more detailed implementation proposal. What specifically should this model look like? @tardoe can you provide some more detail?