Reasons for Understanding your Network Topology
- Quickly reduce the area for fault detection
- Reduce confusion when a fault occurs
- Reduce time and effort when it comes time for Network expansion
Four Simple Guidelines for network documentation
Relevance – Avoid the temptation of capturing everything, if you collect to much information then it will not get updated, and then it becomes obsolete.
Easy – Use the KISS approach and make is simple. Using an automated system allows you to easily update the network diagram and keep your inventory up to date.
Current – if the information is not current it only takes a couple of instances where a technician refers to this document to give the impression this is not important. You need to automate this process so that the information being used is always current.
Safe - Once compiled this information is sensitive and can contain, device passwords, SNMP community strings. So you need access control to this information. Your information should itself be password protected and encrypted whenever possible. Your system needs to be available, even the best documentation scheme can't help if it isn't available when it's needed. Plan to have the documentation available when an outage occurs. One solution is to set its own system up, that is independent of the network, which is then available at all times.
Featured Products – Visualize your Network
Spend less time documenting your IT network and more time managing it:
If you spend time trying to validate network connectivity and your hand-built network diagram is out of date then it is time to look at an automated solution that allows you to keep your inventory up to date and manage the network more effectively.
Link Analyst allows you to do an Active Discovery of the network so that you can see
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See what devices are connected to the network, and how they are connected
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Obtain graphical and table-based display of a network, network segment, or remote locations on the WAN
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Monitor response time and performance of devices anywhere on the network
autoMap takes data visualization to the next level. autoMap automatically visualizes an entire infrastructure network and discovers and reports on all devices and software installed. autoMap generates graphical topology drawings of infrastructure networks, using Microsoft Office Visio. Frequently installed it makes it easy to use and deploy autoMap.
You can save your drawings and asset information to a web server to be viewed at a web page.
autoAsset is an inventory tool, constantly keeping track of an organizations valuable assets, providing unparalleled visibility to any infrastructure or VoIP network.
autoAsset operates from the Layer2 devices out to the installed software on the edge device. This produces a highly accurate discovery of connected components. This approach is much more useful when making network design judgments and evaluating the impact of new converged applications - such as VoIP.
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