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Networking

Managing Router and Switch Inventories? 35

Posted by Cliff from the more-than-just-a-parts-list dept.
JabbaTheFart asks: "How does the Slashdot community deal with network equipment inventories. After searching Slashdot and seeing this post, I found a few good projects that work with computers (such as IRM, Request Tracker) but they don't cope with the specifics that you would need to work with routers and switches like: port info, firmware versions, currently running config, and so forth. I have looked into network monitoring projects like NMIS, Orion, and others but I would still need regular management information like serial numbers, contract status, price, etc. A simple database could work, but it would be nice to have web access. What do you use to keep track of all that network equipment that you are in charge of?"
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Managing Router and Switch Inventories? More

Managing Router and Switch Inventories?

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  • Altiris' Network Management Solution is supposed to do all that and more. Go to www.altiris.com and you can get a 30 day eval of the product Suites - requires a machine with 1gb or more of memory and SQL server as a back end.

    Best of Luck.
    • Most off the shelf System Management solutions don't do a great job of tracking the equipment of a network - ie the routers, switches - they are focused mainly on the desktops, laptops, servers and handheld units - devices on which their agents can be installed and managed.
  • Altiris is a major POS

  • Depends on what hardware you have... (Score:3, Informative)

    by karnal ( 22275 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @01:18PM (#12951579)
    I would bet money that the "big players" all have their own management/tracking/response software.

    That being said, our workplace uses Epicenter - Extreme Networks' monitoring software. It does all that you've asked for. As well, we also use SNMP and a common event logger - so that any errors and configurations automagically show up in our centralized network control.

    Seriously, if you have a big enough shop, you should probably be centered around one vendor for a solution for switches, and there should be management tools for those. Of course, this tends to work not-so-well for those who have linksys switches all over the place... but then again, you wouldn't need firmware revs etc for dumb switches.....

  • A wild idea (Score:4, Funny)

    by Intron ( 870560 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @01:35PM (#12951710)
    "they don't cope with the specifics that you would need to work with routers and switches like: port info, firmware versions, currently running config, and so forth"

    Too true. If only there were some sort of file type that could handle arbitrary ASCII data. Then I could store any information that I wanted by just typing it on a keyboard! Of course, there would have to be utilities for searching based on arbitrary text or wildcard text entries. An even more ambitious person might want a file type that could arrange this data into columns and rows that could be easily sorted on their contents. As you can see, this would quickly break down into a monstrously difficult undertaking.

  • You need RTx::AssetTracker (Score:3, Informative)

    by cjsnell ( 5825 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @01:36PM (#12951718) Journal

    You should check out RTx::AssetTracker [chaka.net], an asset management extension to RT [bestpractical.com]. Like RT, you can easily create custom fields to hold your router configs, firmware versions, etc.

    Demo here. [chaka.net]
  • samag has an article in sept 2004's issue called "System Inventory Using LDAP". their goal isn't quite the same as yours (they are mostly after installed software), but the principles apply in nearly the same way. try to find a copy and give it a read. it doesn't look like it's available online [samag.com] though =(

  • InTrac (Score:3, Informative)

    by knewter ( 62953 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @02:10PM (#12952025)
    DISCLAIMER: Yes, it's a plug, but it seems like it's worthwhile given the lack of useful tools listed in this thread.

    I'm one of the programmers at http://www.inline.com/ [inline.com], and we developed an application called InTrac that we sell that does basically this. It's not as full-featured as our internet department (the router dealers-with) would /like/ it to be, but it's much better than what they had previously (spreadsheets, which proved to be entirely unscalable). It allows for asset types to be defined, which have specific criteria associated with them (various field types available). It also supports ticketing, with tickets assigned to assets. It was built with both ticketing and asset tracking in mind (tickets will have different fields based on the asset type, as well...this makes it easy to get those helldeskers to ask appropriate questions).

    One big benefit I find when using InTrac (because it's used for all kinds of assets, not just routers - web sites, web hosting, SQL database information, etc.) is that I can oftentimes solve a problem quickly just by looking through the ticket history for the asset. It's obvious, and any ticketing system will allow you to do this, but we had HEAT previously, and that's why we built InTrac (that and a need for centralized asset management...but if HEAT's ticketing had worked as well as it should have, we wouldn't have developed the software most likely)...

    Anyway, if anyone's interested in more information they can either contact myself or use the contact information listed on the website.
  • You are just looking in the wrong place.

    If you are relatively homogenious - you can use the manufacturers management utilities that will do this. I haven't run across a manufacturer of decent manageable hardware that doesn't ship a management utility that does everything that you want.

    If you are in a more hetrogenious environment (or want a better interface) the standards are of course OpenView and Netview (HP, or IBM/Tivolit) that are your standard network management tools.

    Don't expect to see them

  • We're using a Wiki for this sort of thing. In particular, we are using TWiki. I'm sure other wiki's have the features we are using.

    We have a template for adding new hosts and we use the %SEARCH{}% stuff to generate tables of devices. We even use the %CALENDAR{}% plugin to map out when events happen.
    • Along the same lines, if you're looking to get started in wiki's and want something designed for documentation, but find twiki intimidating (which I did), you could try dokuwiki. It doesn't have nearly as many features as twiki, but it's easier to setup and it is made for documenting IT stuff.

  • I'm on a neverending quest for basically the same thing. Every piece of asset tracking software I've tried either has extra bells and whistles like a ticketing system or other nonsense included, or is far too focused on software or Windows to be useful to me. Ideally, I'd love to find an open-source, web-based asset tracking system that allows for custom fields, hyperlinks, and user/group permissions to allow different levels of access to different assets/groups of assets. No ticketing, no monitoring, no
  • It takes three steps, to avoid order(N^2) or N! problems. Asking every machine on your network about every service in existence takes a bit too long to be practical (:-))
    1. Discover just the machines "interesting" to you, via something like ping or snmp queries initially, then discard those which do not meet your standard of intrestingness, such as those which aren't talking on a port of interest. Order N.
    2. Then build a topology with a gui that allows a human to organize the machines into a visual layout th
  • Intermapper at www.intermapper.com
  • ...a simple database with an in-house PHP web front-end. *grin*

  • Answer (Score:2)

    by mnmn ( 145599 )
    "How does the Slashdot community deal with network equipment inventories"

    Excel sheets!

    If thats not enough Access.

    If thats not enough use something like mysql in the backend. I doubt you'd hit that limit with the number of routers and switches.

    Ask Slashdot: How does the slashdot crowd sell hairtonic, to Bald Eagles, in Nebraska?

    Dude, research a LITTLE.
  • http://ftp.shrubbery.net/rancid [shrubbery.net]

    Will store your configs including SW versions in a CVS tree. You could easily parse this stuff and dump it into a DB.
  • Unless you're dealing with thousands of routers/switches, a simple spreadsheet ought to suffice.
  • MRO's [slashdot.org] Maximo product does a good job at managing just about any physical plant activity.

  • Netdisco. (Score:2, Informative)

    by mor70 ( 635563 )
    http://netdisco.org/ [netdisco.org] Does network discovery and layer 2 topology.
  • We [rutgers.edu] use Voyence [voyence.com] for configuration management of almost 2000 Cisco devices. It gets the job done, does diffing of configurations for easy to see changes, scheduled jobs, things like that. As an alternative, you can probably roll your own around something like CVS.

  • check out: http://netdisco.org/ [netdisco.org]
    It also draws a layer 2 map and records device IP, MAC, and switch port locations which can be very handy.

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