Network Diagramming Channel Feature

Attendance at OPNET's Network Diagramming Web Briefings Illustrates Need for Automation Tool

By Carrie Schmelkin
TMCnet Web Editor

In case you haven’t heard the scuttlebutt on the street lately, OPNET Technologies’ (News - Alert) network diagramming Web briefings are the place to be, especially if you are a network manager trying to figure out how to automate the process of network diagramming. And the “man” of the hour during these Web briefings is OPNET’s leading network diagramming solution, NetMapper.

“The Web briefings are a great tool for people to, in an hour, get an end-to-end view of what we are doing and to get connected with other people who are asking the same questions so they know they are not the only ones in that boat who don’t have documentation,” Pradeep Singh, senior vice president of engineering at OPNET, told TMCnet. “But there is hope in the horizon because they are looking at our product NetMapper, which addresses their pain points.”

For the past several weeks, OPNET has held a series of Web briefings about NetMapper, its solution which creates up-to-date network diagrams containing detailed physical and logical views, including Layer 2/3, OSPF, EIGRP, MPLS, VLANs, and BGP. Moreover, the network diagramming solution creates rich, multi-layered network diagrams in the industry standard Microsoft (News - Alert) Visio format.

As the typical NetMapper customer is usually the entire IT department, since the solution offers something for everyone, it is particularly useful for those responsible for network documentation. To OPNET, network documentation refers to the entire gamut of diagrams – from inventory to config archives – and NetMapper gives you that comprehensive documentation.

While the Web briefings are well attended, they also tend to bring up similar questions from participants – the first being whether OPNET’s network diagramming solution is vendor agnostic.

“It’s not just Cisco (News - Alert) out there; there’s a lot of other vendors out there so people have questions such as do you support this vendor, do you support that vendor, and our response is yes we support any vendor that is SNMP accessible or that gives us direct access to CLI where we are able to bring in more information to bring more detailed configuration and detailed diagramming for them,” Singh said.

Along those lines, NetMapper also offers comprehensive virtualization support and diagrams for the many devices that are embedded within other devices. OPNET is able to generate out-of-box diagrams that go beyond the traditional physical views and offer views of logical, virtual, and operational configuration. Thanks to its “deep understanding” of network configuration, OPNET has many commonly used OOTB diagram types like L2/L3, operational Spanning Tree, OSPF area view, VLANs, BGP, etc.

Another common question asked during these Web briefings is whether NetMapper allows customers to see in their diagrams when changes have been made. And the answer is yes.

“We have a mode where we can generate a yellow halo for devices that are modified or a green halo for devices that are new since the last time a diagram was generated so that way when they generate the diagram they can know which sections of the network have been modified,” Singh said. “But, we don’t just stop there. When they go to one of these devices that is indicated as modified, they can click and launch the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures right on the diagram itself. This shows you how the changes have occurred in your network between the two instances of the diagram that you are viewing.”

During these Web briefings, OPNET also hopes to convey to participants that NetMapper gives customers the option to customize diagrams from the content to the visualization to the icons to the colors. This in turn gives network operators a lot of flexibility, according to Ankit Agarwal, associate vice president of engineering at OPNET.

NetMapper also boasts scalability as it runs on the smallest of networks to multi-national enterprise networks, something that is garnering a lot of attention from briefing participants.

“The fact that our Web briefings for NetMapper are so heavily attended attests to the fact that there is a definite need out there for a product like this and people are really interested in automating this process,” Agarwal told TMCnet.