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Fresh network devices

Sujay Singh edited this page Jul 30, 2026 · 1 revision

Good news: the architecture already has a slot for this. Network devices are just a new device class with a new lifecycle owner. The call is really about answering five questions. Walk in with these:

1. What is the source of truth for network devices? This is the lifecycle owner question. Candidates: a monitoring or NMS platform (SolarWinds, LibreNMS), Cisco ISE or DNA Center, NetBox or IPAM if they run one, or vendor clouds like Meraki dashboard. Whatever the network team already trusts as their inventory is the owner. Do not let the answer be "the scanner", Rapid7 sees network gear but observing is not owning.

2. What is the identity key? For network gear the answer should be chassis serial number, pulled via SNMP or API. Hostname second. Never management IP, those get reassigned. Two traps to raise in the call: switch stacks report multiple serials per logical device, decide whether a stack is one asset or N. And HA pairs, one cluster or two boxes. Get the network team's answer on both, it shapes the identity map.

3. What fields does Fresh actually need? Push for the same collect wide, write narrow rule. Likely set: hostname, serial, model, OS version, site or location, mgmt IP, uptime or last seen, role (core, access, edge). Vulnerability posture comes from Rapid7 later via the reconciler, not from this collector.

4. API access reality. Does the owner platform have a usable API and who grants credentials? Same Vault pattern, same AppRole scoping. If the answer is "SSH to 400 switches", that is where AAP network modules (cisco.ios facts) become the collector, which we can do, but an NMS API is one call instead of 400 sessions.

5. Seeding and retirement policy. Fresh likely has some network assets already, manually created. So same arc as Intune: adoption first via serial match, gap report for unmatched, seeding capped after trust, retirement only via the guarded path when the owner source stops reporting a device.

Your one slide message for the call: routers and switches plug into the existing pipeline as one more collector and one ownership table row. Nothing about the engine, guards, ledger, or Fresh model changes. The only decisions needed from this group are owner source, identity rules for stacks and HA, and the field list.

Bring back those answers and the collector design writes itself.

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