[AusNOG] Network Visualisation Tools, favourites? [SEC=UNOFFICIAL]

[Keith Sinclair]

Hi all, my first post here, I was told about this thread and thought I
would chime in.

I have built bespoke solutions for diagraming network topology and
traffic flows and have used most of the free visualisation products
and libraries.  My focus has usually been large network diagrams for
printing, analysis, discovery, etc, not real time operational
diagrams.

Using yEd as the graphing layout and visualisation engine, and a
network model I developed, which would parse configs, read databases
or flat files, allow various manipulations and transformations.  From
the network model I would generate the required file for yEd, GraphViz
or other.

Using this I have successfully built interactive (non real time)
network diagrams of several private national Australia WAN and DC's,
one of these over 4000 network nodes (plus another 4000 subnet nodes),
there are some specific layout options in yEd that work very well for
auto grouping and clustering of devices in what I would call
meta-topologies.  yEd is then great for changing the diagram, or
deleting irrelevant nodes, modelling new changes, etc.  All fully zoom
in and out, collapsible groups, etc.

The network traffic maps were especially useful and really helped to
pinpoint what the problem (challenging) subnets, data centres were
going to be for migration, this data was summarised

Some low res snapshots, the PDF's from these were 4000dpi, so these
are just the top level view.
http://sinclair.org.au/keith/topology/Full_Network.png
http://sinclair.org.au/keith/topology/Raw_Traffic_Matrix.png

yFiles make various commercial versions of yEd using Java or Flex,
which colleagues of mine have used in commercial solutions, and work
really well.

I had some earlier success with Graphviz but Graphviz doesn't handle
much past about 100 nodes, but I haven't tested it recently so it
might have improved.  To combat that, I would analyse the topology and
auto group nodes, and built smaller maps and meta maps which would
cross link.

I learnt many things from these endeavors, the main one was that so
much in a network topology is operationally irrelevant, so not showing
it is OK, just representing things in a clouds works well.

Another thing was that pretty much whatever you produced would only
make some of the people happy, it seems that network diagrams are
highly personal and stylised, more so than most other aspects of
network management and operations.

The last important lesson was that manual was bad, with large dynamic
topologies, you needed as much layout automation as possible.


Regards


Keith

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 4:53 PM, Jennifer Margrison
<jennifer.margrison at humanservices.gov.au> wrote:
> I have to agree with Andrew, diagrams  don't scale well.  When you have
> more than eight or ten links into a node they don't help you much.  For
> the quick mud-map type of things that the OP seemed to be referring to,
> there are various types of visual shorthand  to represend large numbers of
> objects but to generate configs the diagram would have to be complete.
>
>
> Jenny
>
> (apologies for the  disclaimer)
>
>>
>> Andrew Fort
>>
>> to:
>>
>> Simon Knight
>>
>> 19/09/2011 03:39 PM
>>
>> Sent by:
>>
>> <ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net>
>>
>> Cc:
>>
>> ausnog
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Simon Knight <simon.knight at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> > yEd is a free diagram drawing tool, comparable to Omnigraffle or
>> > Visio. After tracing over 200 network maps for our Topology Zoo
>> > project, I prefer yEd whenever I have to use OmniGraffle for drawing
>> > diagrams (and doesn't have the price tag)
>> > http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_download.html
>> >
>> > On a related note, I am very interested in the requirements network
>> > operators have for both network drawing and network visualisation
>> > tools. Joel Obstfeld from Juniper spoke briefly about some of the
>> > stuff we are doing at the University of Adelaide with regards to
>> > network design and configuration. Our aim would be to take a network
>> > diagram from something like yEd, Visio or Omnigraffle, and construct
>> > the network configuration from this. We are part way into this process
>> > - we can generate working configurations from a network diagram - and
>> > would like to get some input from industry in terms of network design
>> > and config tasks.
>>
>> In my view, this sounds like a solution to the wrong problem.
>>
>> Have the network database provision your network resources, build the
>> config, and the diagrams.  Doing it the other way around seems to
>> encourage divergence from your standards.
>>
>> > Visualisation is also a key part of network operations, and is
>> > something we are also interested in.
>> >
>> > Any feedback or input is welcomed - either on or off list.
>> >
>> > Cheers
>> > Simon
>> >
>> >
>
>>
>> --
>> Andrew Fort (afort at choqolat.org)
>
>
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