Network inventory and configuration tracking tools

Fri Aug 9 13:40:18 UTC 2002

On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Sean Donelan wrote:

> How about an operations oriented question.  What is the current
> preferences amoung network operators for network inventory and
> configuration management tools? Not so much status monitoring (up,
> down) but other stuff network operator wants to know like circuit
> IDs (how many IDs can a circuit have?), network contacts, design layout
> reports (layer 1/2/3), what's supposed to be connected to that port?
> The stuff you can't get out of the box itself.
>
> Most ISPs seem to end up with a combination of homegrown systems,
> opensource, and commercial products.  The commercial "integrated"
> systems have lots of stuff, and according to the vendors can do
> anything including splice fiber.

We ended up in large part developing our own tools in-house.

One is an SQL database to store and link network elements (routers,
interfaces/ports, circuits, IP addresses, contacts, etc) with hooks into
other internal databases and other outward-facing applications, such as
our rwhois server.

Another is a tool that polls our network devices once every few hours and
backs up their configuration into an RCS filestore so we have journaling
capabilities.

We do use some commercial tools, but those are mainly for customer
presentation (VitalSuite) and up/down reporting and event correlation
(Netcool).

jms