How is the "Owner" concept integrated?

[BuJo]

I'm wondering what separates the Owner concept from Users and Contacts.

Previously I modeled "administrative ownership" by assigning a Contact with a special Contact Role. Now having the Owner concept, that makes the assignment more "immediate", however I'm not getting fully what separates the Owner from the other Models.

E.g. a Device:

erDiagram
  User
  Tenant
  Contact
  ContactRole
  ContactAssignment
  Device
  Owner
  
  ContactAssignment ||--|{ Device : assigned_to
  Contact ||--|{ ContactAssignment : has_contact
  ContactRole ||--|| ContactAssignment : has_role
  Device ||--o{ Tenant : belongs_to
  ContactAssignment ||--|{ Tenant : assigned_to
  Device ||--|| Owner : owned_by
  Tenant ||--|| Owner : owned_by
  Owner ||--o{ User : authenticated_by

  Owner {
    string name
  }
  Contact {
    string name
  }
  User {
    string name
  }

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So, I'm a little unsure on how to use the new concept.

Observations:

• The new Owner concept enables linking a User which can log in to NetBox to a Device (or other entities)
• There are three entities with a Name
• The two concepts seem unrelated, looking at the ER diagram, only a Tenant can (tentatively) link Contacts to an Owner
• There is no way to contact a User, except via the E-Mail field
• The Name in Owner is not first and last name, but only name, is it not for names of people?
• Tenant and Contact are in the Organizational section, Owner and User are in the Administrational section

Unsure if I have missed something, which links those two concept with one another, or if I simply misunderstood the contacts, or (given that it's a new concept) that there's simply a missing link.

Does anyone have a "way of doing things"?
Is it a distinction of "use the organizational entities when talking about who physically owns a device and use the administrational entities when talking about who is in charge of maintaining the NetBox information for that device"?

[BuJo]

Having thought a little.

Maybe I just have a different idea in mind:

• A User can have a Contact
• A Device can have a Contact (or Contact Group) as Owner

The three grouping concepts User Groups, Contact Groups and Owner Groups... maybe it's the duplication between those three concepts where I would add a single "person" in all three is kind of tripping me up and I just need a concrete example on how best to use it?

[pheus]

Hi BuJo,

Thanks for taking the time to write this up (and for including the ER diagram) — it makes the underlying question really clear.

After reading through the feature docs and the original FR, my takeaway is that NetBox is now intentionally modeling a few different “who/what” dimensions that can overlap in the real world, but aren’t the same thing:

• Tenant = who the resource is for / dedicated to (customer, internal business unit, etc.). It’s about service consumption or allocation.
• Contacts (+ roles) = who you might need to reach out to about the resource, and in what capacity (operational, administrative, emergency, billing, vendor/RMA, …). Contacts are meant to carry rich contact details (phone/email/title/etc.), and an object can have many contact assignments with different roles.
• Owner = who is responsible for administering the object in NetBox (i.e., the NetBox users/groups accountable for keeping that record accurate). This is why Owner is “a set of users and/or groups” — it’s designed for operational responsibility inside NetBox.

That framing also explains a few of your observations:

• The Owner name is intentionally generic because an Owner is often a team/function, not an individual person (e.g., “NOC”, “DC Ops”, “Network Engineering”). The “people” linkage happens through the Owner’s members (users and/or user groups).
• Users are primarily authentication/authorization identities (often synced from SSO/LDAP), so NetBox keeps them fairly lightweight. If you need “address book” style details, that’s what Contacts are for.
• The UI separation (“Organizational” vs “Administrative”) is basically reflecting the same idea: tenancy/contacts model organizational reality; owners/users model how NetBox itself is operated and maintained.

A concrete example (works for an enterprise or an MSP):

You have devices in a colocation serving Customer A:

• tenant = Customer A (who it’s for)
• contacts = Customer A NOC (role=Operations), Customer A PM (role=Administrative), Hardware vendor (role=RMA) (who to notify/call, and why)
• owner = "Ops Team West" with members = NetBox user group ops-west (who on your side owns maintaining those NetBox objects)

In that setup:

• Tenant answers “who is this dedicated to?”
• Contacts answers “who do we contact, and in what role?”
• Owner answers “which NetBox users/groups are responsible for administering this object in NetBox?”

Docs / background I found helpful:

• Feature: https://netboxlabs.com/docs/netbox/features/resource-ownership/
• Model: https://netboxlabs.com/docs/netbox/models/users/owner/
• FR: Assign users and groups as object owners #20304

Hope that helps.

[BuJo]

Thank you for your thoughts, @pheus !