Map my network!
January 4, 2007 12:51 PM   Subscribe

Anyone know of a visual network mapping program?

I have a overhead schematic of my office building and I would like to be able to drop nodes on it representing computers/servers. Anyone know of an COTS packages that can do that or have any ideas of where to look?

Bonus points if after populating the list it can so some SNMP stuff.
posted by wavering to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Nagios might be what you're looking for, but maybe not. It has a ton of monitoring information, and a variety of presentation layers- I believe, but am not 100% sure, you can define a physical layout, and have that still tied to active monitoring data (see the 3-d layout for example, on the screenshots page)


Also, b1tr0t noted Visio (of which there are open source versions), which type of program is great for physical mapping. Do searches on UML to find open source/free alternatives to Visio. I believe Visio has/had (discontinued in Visio 2003, read this, so you might get a cheap copy of Visio 2000 and be quite happy) an autodiscovery option that would read SNMP or AD to "build" a map of your network/resources.

But as I understand it, you want to actually build the map yourself, using physical information, and then hopefully have it integrated with active monitoring/SNMP info. The latter is a tough call: Visio and its open source alternatives are about making static maps, which they are very good at. Nagios is the only one I know that might let you create the physical map in Nagio, and then have it tied to active monitoring data.
posted by hincandenza at 2:21 PM on January 4, 2007


This is kinda a shot in the dark, but Cheops-NG is another open-source tool that's similar to Nagios, albeit with less functionality. Might be worth a look if nothing else fits.
posted by JohnFredra at 4:06 PM on January 4, 2007


This might be to simple for what you need, but you never know, it works quite well:

Kaboodle
Kaboodle® is a free, open-source Internet app which provides:

* Complete visualization of your LAN, updated in near-real time.
* A point-and-click interface to take remote-control of what it finds.
* A "personal VPN" capability to securely connect Kaboodle-enabled LANs together across the Internet.
* File transfer, continous network monitoring, and more.
posted by dflock at 6:10 AM on January 5, 2007


dflock: the problem with Kaboodle, and Visio and others for that matter that in some way support autodiscovery, is that they are logical/topological autodiscovery maps. The OP seems to want a physical (overhead layout of the office) map of all the resources, which is Visio et al, but also to potentially link that map to active data (say, to color code resources red, green or yellow based on their "health" as determined by other monitoring).
posted by hincandenza at 2:22 PM on January 5, 2007


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