Network Diagramming Channel Feature

Accurate Network Diagramming without all the Hassle: A Video Tour of OPNET's NetMapper

By Beecher Tuttle
TMCnet Contributor

Creating and maintaining accurate and up-to-date network diagrams is critical for any IT enterprise that needs to keep a watchful eye on their network assets. These diagrams give operators the tools necessary to accelerate network troubleshooting, enhance network planning and demonstrate compliance with various security and regulatory standards.

The difficulty that most organizations have with network diagrams is that they are a pain to generate manually, and are even more difficult to keep updated.

For many enterprises, the solution to this predicament is OPNET's NetMapper, an automated network diagramming tool that takes all the hassle out of generating detailed network configuration data and presenting them in charts, tables and reports.

OPNET was on hand at the most recent Interop (News - Alert) show in Las Vegas, where VP of application engineering, Bruce Ecklund, showed off the NetMapper solution to Information Week TV's Jeff Doyle.

Created Visio diagrams manually is a time-consuming and painstaking process, says Ecklund, and one that often results in human errors. "So whenever you go and ask for a Visio diagram, you get something that is often outdated and not even accurate," he told Doyle.

NetMapper removes this headache by automating the network discovery process and collecting valuable, deep and up-to-date information that can be used to create rich engineering documentation and other inventory level data associated with the network, Ecklund adds.

The solution can be used to generate functional troubleshooting documents and physical and logical views, such as Layer 2/3, OSPF, EIGRP, MPLS, VLANs, and BGP.

Ecklund says that the solution can work with any size network and can recognize any SNMP device. NetMapper offers users a number of ways to display and manage the content, while keeping the interface as clean as possible.

Simply click on the icon for a given device to begin generating highly customizable tables, says Ecklund. "You want a lot of data, but you don't want it to clutter the Visio diagram that you created."

As for how NetMapper actually works, Ecklund told Doyle that the solution acts as a discovery engine that reaches out and communicates directly with the network. NetMapper can crawl through any part of the network that it is told to, and stores the data in an offline database for security purposes.

Best of all, says Ecklund, the automated diagramming tool can go out and collect new data whenever users need an update. For the latest release, OPNET programmed NetMapper to highlight any network changes that may have occurred or new devices that may have been added between tests. This way, operators can quickly gain visibility over the evolution of the network.

Enterprises that wish to take NetMapper on a test drive can head to this product page to request a free network diagram.

"As long as they can send us some sample configuration files, we'll generate a Visio diagram of their network and ship it to them so that they can see what it would look like in their own infrastructure," says Ecklund.

Check out the full video interview below. 

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