wtf is netbox-grafana-annotations-plugin?

NetBox Grafana Annotations Plugin connects two tools that network teams commonly use but that normally do not talk to each other. NetBox is where you record what your network is supposed to look like, such as a device's role or status, while Grafana is where you watch graphs of how the network actually behaves over time. This plugin makes sure that when someone changes something in NetBox, a marker automatically appears on the matching Grafana graph at that exact moment. The problem it solves is a familiar one for anyone managing infrastructure: a graph shows a spike or a drop, and the first question is whether anything changed around that time. Without this plugin, answering that means manually digging through NetBox's own change log and comparing timestamps by eye. With it, the marker is already sitting on the graph, so the connection between a NetBox edit and a Grafana graph is visible at a glance. Under the hood, it relies entirely on NetBox's built in Event Rule and Webhook system, so no custom code changes are needed inside NetBox itself. When a rule fires, it sends a signed request to the plugin, which verifies the signature, figures out which Grafana dashboard or panel the changed object relates to, either through a manually set field or by searching Grafana's tags, and then posts an annotation using Grafana's own API. Every attempt, whether it succeeds or fails, is logged inside NetBox so you can check what happened. The author is upfront about a limitation: the marker only shows when something was recorded in NetBox, not necessarily the exact moment a device's real behavior changed, since NetBox does not push configuration to devices itself. It requires NetBox 4.6 or later, Python 3.12 or later, and a reachable Grafana instance with an API token, with no other services like a database or message queue needed. It is installed with pip directly from the GitHub repository since it is not yet published to PyPI, and it is released under the Apache 2.0 license.