Leverage the `Metadata` feature to allow advanced data governance

[chadell]

Environment

• Nautobot version: 2.3.x
• nautobot-ssot version:

Proposed Functionality

Incorporate basic metadata for data imported using the metadata feature

Use Case

This could allow better data governance in Nautobot, and allow for advanced data clean-up functionalities understanding which data souce takes more precedence

From the example:

... omitted code ...

# Define the different metadata sources, in this case ServiceNow
choice_service_now = MetadataChoice(
    metadata_type=source_cmdb_type,
    value="SNOW"
)

... omitted code ...

# For every object/fields, assign the  source
source_cmdb_metadata = ObjectMetadata(
    metadata_type=source_cmdb_type,
    assigned_object=device,
    scoped_fields=["name", "location", "primary_ip4", "device_type"]  # Only these fields are sourced from the upstream CMDB
)
source_cmdb_metadata.value = choice_service_now.value 

[Kircheneer]

Related: https://github.com/nautobot/nautobot-app-ssot/issues/577

[Kircheneer]

The documentation already hints at a clear use case, which is the one that you have already outlined @chadell.

The following are things are can provide out of the box through inference:

• Which system of record is this data originally sourced from? (through the name of the integration, including fields through their names)
• When was this data last synced from that system into Nautobot?

I believe we should make these toggle-able, potentially think about even making the names of the MetadataType configurable.

[chadell]

yup, that's the point. I think it should be part of the framework to easily use it :)

[Kircheneer]

Not sure I want to close this quite yet, we haven't incorporated anything in the documentation, and only one of our integrations implement this feature, also there is nothing in contrib.

[Kircheneer]

• Create a MetadataType of type datetime per integration called "Last sync from job.Meta.data_source" - we can do this in the job in the sync_data method by checking if the Nautobot adapter is a subclass of or exactly the nautobot_ssot.contrib.NautobotAdapter class
  • Also check the setting explained further down
• On model.create and model.update, create or update the timestamp value in the metadata
  • Also check the settings explained further down
• In nautobot_config.py under PLUGINS_CONFIG.nautobot_ssot.enable_metadata_for there is a list of Job class names for which metadata should be used