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App Overview

This document provides an overview of the App, including critical information and important considerations when applying it to your Nautobot environment.

Note

Throughout this documentation, the terms "app" and "plugin" are used interchangeably.

Description

The Load Balancer Models Nautobot app extends the Nautobot Core Data Model to integrate essential load balancing features, such as the management of Local and Global Traffic Managers (LTM/GTM), virtual servers, pools, health monitoring, and SSL/TLS certificate management.

Designed to fit seamlessly with existing DCIM and IPAM models, this app provides a clear, consistent framework for configuring, documenting, and maintaining load balancing infrastructure within network environments.

Audience (User Personas) - Who should use this App?

Network Admins who need to model Load Balancing features within their Source of Truth to programmatically generate configurations for load balancers and related resources, such as virtual servers, pools, health checks, and SSL/TLS profiles.

Authors and Maintainers

  • Stephen Kiely (@smk4664)
  • Gary Snider (@gsnider2195)
  • Hanlin Miao (@HanlinMiao)
  • Jason Belk (@jabelk)

Nautobot Features Used

This app introduces the following data models to Nautobot:

  • HealthCheckMonitor
  • LoadBalancerPool
  • LoadBalancerPoolMember
  • VirtualServer
  • CertificateProfile

The Load Balancer Models App integrates with DCIM and IPAM models to assign IP Addresses and prefixes to Virtual Servers and Load Balancer Pool Members, and to associate Virtual Servers with physical devices or logical groupings like Virtual Chassis, Device Redundancy Groups, or Cloud Services.

The data models introduced by the app support the following Nautobot core features:

  • REST API
  • GraphQL
  • Custom fields
  • Custom links
  • Relationships
  • Change logging
  • Custom data validation logic
  • Webhooks

Extending the Data Model for Vendor-Specific Features

While the app provides a vendor-agnostic core data model, some vendor-specific configurations — such as F5 iRules, persistence profiles, or SNAT settings — are not explicitly modeled. This is intentional, to avoid overfitting the model to one platform.

To support these use cases, Nautobot users can define Custom Fields on models such as VirtualServer or LoadBalancerPoolMember.

Custom Fields can be used to:

  • Add multi-select lists of vendor profiles (e.g., iRules)
  • Store raw config blobs using a JSON field
  • Capture platform-specific metadata not shared across vendors