Its been a few years since I looked at network discovery and mapping
tools. Openview/et al did the job, but was always a pain to move all
the boxes to the right spots on the resulting maps.
Has network discovery and mapping improved for medium-scale wide
area networks for ISPs (e.g. 1,000 networks, 100,000 network devices)?
I've found lots of discovery tools, but intelligent mapping/layout still
seems to be a problem. The usual requirements for SNMP smart discovery,
interface/subnet mapping, device identification and connecting the right
symbols with the right lines to all the other symbols.
Sunday, June 22, 2003, 7:58:39 AM, Sean wrote:
Its been a few years since I looked at network discovery and mapping
tools. Openview/et al did the job, but was always a pain to move all
the boxes to the right spots on the resulting maps.
Has network discovery and mapping improved for medium-scale wide
area networks for ISPs (e.g. 1,000 networks, 100,000 network devices)?
I've found lots of discovery tools, but intelligent mapping/layout still
seems to be a problem. The usual requirements for SNMP smart discovery,
interface/subnet mapping, device identification and connecting the right
symbols with the right lines to all the other symbols.
www.solarwinds.net
They have excellent collection of tools which is probably what you;re
looking for.
Windows only afaik
That's quite a "medium-scale".
Is there a single entity in the world that controls 1,000 networks and
100,000 network devices?
Andy
I am a network engineer for a cable ISP. We have over 50,000 cable modems
and around 65,000 customer devices. We only have 200-250 networks, but
well over 100,000 ip devices.
> That's quite a "medium-scale".
>
> Is there a single entity in the world that controls 1,000 networks and
> 100,000 network devices?
WorldCom^Hn
Well, sure, MCI is a single company that owns that many networks and
possibly network devices, but are you saying there's a single group of
people within MCI who are tasked with mapping, down to the host level,
across their entire network? It would seem reasonable to me that there is
some hierarchy involved...European division deals with its network, etc.
Its a bit like the fish that got away. People have varying ideas about
how big is big. Its smaller than the Internet, but larger than a mom&pop
network. Most americans consider themselves "middle-class," no matter
what their net worth is.
As far as a "single entity," obviously all large organizations have
learned how to delegate responsibility. The US Military has about 3
million network devices connected to 3,000 networks. But no single person
really controls all 3 million network devices. Its the organizational
gaps between entities I'm interested in mapping. I want to discover
and map the connections indviduals may know about, but no one realized
how all the pieces were connected.
So far the recommendations have included
Cheops
NetViz
OpenView
Intermapper
[...]
I'm not one to push commercial products, but I don't know of a
freely available tool that does the equivalent of what Lumeta
<http://www.lumeta.com> does. This being the solution based on
the original work of Cheswick and Burch. This may be just the
kind of thing if you need to discover unexpected or even unknown
paths.
John