[AusNOG] Network mapping Tool/Software

[Ben Buxton]

Having purely manually generated diagrams are bad - they invariably fall
out of sync thanks to chaos theory.

But similarly, having only autogenerated diagrams also is problematic, as
you can't be sure that what is there actually should be there.

To do this properly, you need to generate two sets of diagrams.

One is your discovered topology, auto generated from LLDP/configs/snmp/etc
and gives you actual state of what your network truly looks like.

The other is your "intended" topology, which is built from systems that
describe what your network *should* look like. This might be a
provisioning/billing system, or even manually updated as part of your
change request workflow.

With this, you can look at what your network is supposed to be, and then
look at what it actually is. Any discrepancies can be investigated to see
whether a request was not provisioned properly or a change happened outside
approved process.

The closer your network gets to having purely automated provisioning, the
more converged these diagrams will be. How to make them easily comparable
is left as an exercise.

BB


On 13 September 2014 18:33, Paul Gear <ausnog at libertysys.com.au> wrote:

>  On 13/09/14 11:33, Jared Hirst wrote:
>
>  Hey Guys,
>
>  Our network map is getting rather large now and hard to manage in Visio
> with so many switches and links coming online daily, what does everyone use
> to manage this between a team of network guys?
>
>  Or do you all just document the core network that doesn't change and not
> the edges?
>
>  Happy to have replies for suggested software and ideas on and off list.
>
>  ​Cheers,
> Jared​
>
>
> Hi Jared,
>
> We had a discussion on the list about this a while back - probably worth
> reviewing:
> http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/2011-September/011189.html
>
> In the intervening time, I've rebuilt 90% of the core of a medium-sized
> corporate network, and I have to say I would never use Visio, but would
> instead use graphviz, either manually specified or automatically generated
> from LLDP/CDP info and/or interface IPs/masks.  (I'd probably try the
> latter if I was starting fresh.)
>
> Regards,
> Paul
>
>
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