Exploring Network Discovery with Visio 2002, Part 1

Published: May 1, 2001

By Jeff Yarnell

Microsoft Corporation

Applies to:
Microsoft Visio Professional 2002
Microsoft Visio Standard 2002

Nothing is more important than well-trained professionals when it comes to network management, but those same professionals are hampered when they can't visualize exactly what they're working with. Detailed, comprehensive documentation is the secret to managing networks that are constantly changing.

On This Page

Still Scavenger Hunting?
There Must be an Easier Way
What You Need to Know
What's Next?

Still Scavenger Hunting?

Creating network documentation by hand is no easy task. In fact, many organizations don't have any documentation that accurately depicts their current network structure. Without such data, exploring your network means you're forced to do just that—put on your walking shoes, get the keys to the wiring closets, and go scavenger hunting for device names, addresses, serial numbers, and everything else you need to know.

Heterogeneous networks, however, are complex by nature. That complexity can make for difficult troubleshooting, even as companies depend more and more on their networks to run smoothly, and makes manually maintaining network documentation practically impossible.

There Must be an Easier Way

Assuming you don't want to go searching through wiring closets and under desks, what you really want is a good network discovery tool. Ideally, such a tool would allow you to easily:

• Gather all the information necessary to help you understand your network as it exists today.

• Plan for future growth.

• Diagnose problems when they occur.

• Update the information with network changes.

• Work with the information to manage network assets. How many times has a supposedly simple configuration change produced an unexpected outage?

• Present the information visually and clearly so you can see your network structure, in as much detail as necessary for each task.

What You Need to Know

So, assuming you're convinced of the value of network discovery, let's consider just what you want it to do. First, if you're responsible for the core of the network, you probably want to know a lot about the switches and routers that provide the high-speed backbone. If you're responsible for server and desktop systems, you'd like to know server names and locations and the bandwidth available between important clients. When you need to move a desktop machine, or determine why a client can't access an important network resource, knowing where those clients connect to the network would be a big help.

If you're responsible for remote offices connected by WAN (Wide Area Network) links, you probably want to know both the protocols used to create the circuits between those remote sites and the network's core, and the bandwidth available on those circuits.

If all this sounds like a lot of diverse information, you're right—it is. To gather it, a network discovery tool has to use a number of network protocols and do a fair amount of reverse engineering. Given the complexity of data networks, you could compare that tool's task to scavenger hunting on your behalf—collecting information from a variety of individuals, including many who speak different languages, some who don't talk at all, and others who have a tendency to lie.

What's Next?

You recognize both the value of the details of your network configuration, and the complexity involved in automatically discovering those details. In my next article, I'll discuss how to make that complex task straightforward.

See Exploring Network Discovery in Visio 2002, Part 2 on the TechNet Technology Center for Visio 2002.