[111745] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Network diagram software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin Day)
Wed Feb 11 14:16:12 2009
From: Kevin Day <toasty@dragondata.com>
To: Mathias Wolkert <mathias.wolkert@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <3e306c60902110506l4d539149w25b1a49298b70d40@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:15:59 -0600
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On Feb 11, 2009, at 7:06 AM, Mathias Wolkert wrote:
> I'd like to know what software people are using to document networks.
> Visio is obvious but feels like a straight jacket to me.
> I liked netviz but it seems owned by CA and unsupported nowadays.
>
> What do you use?
>
> /Tias
Two packages that I'm looking at right now for a project.
RackMonkey http://flux.org.uk/projects/rackmonkey/
Simple, AJAX-ified, looks very easy to use for non-nerds. Keeps track
of rack space allocations, devices, even does some neat tricks using
Dell service tags to let you see warranty/config info.
RackTables http://racktables.org/
More advanced, but quite a bit more complex. Keeps track of devices,
how they're connected, IP allocations, vlans, "virtual servers", etc.
Some tools to let you automatically populate the database.
Neither appear to do power management, or much in the way of physical
cable routing. Power is becoming a big thing for everyone - a tool
that let us track idle/average/max power loads per device, and play
'what-if' with circuit/rack placement would make my life a lot easier.
Like others posted, one of the big problems is that you can't put
everything into one visualization. For us, we need physical/L1 (rack
space planning, power planning, cable routing, asset tracking, etc),
network/L2 (switches, vlans, mac addresses), IP/L3 (IP management,
subnets, virtual servers, etc), Application/L4+ (what apps/services
run on which servers, domain names, etc)
I'm not aware of any one tool that does all of that, but there seems
to be a lot of appeal in tying all those things together.
-- Kevin
