I need a relatively inexpensive tool that will map out my network for me. The director of IT made mention of Visio but I don't know of any add ins that will actually map the network in Visio. I want this software to do discovery of devices across our LAN and hopefully wan. He stated that solar winds was expensive.
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3COM has an application called Network supervisor.
http://www.3com.com/produc
It comes free with 3com switches, but is available for purchase also.
It allows you to discover devices by subnet. It works pretty well and it also monitors devices for problematic issues as well, such as congestion.
I use this to discover the devices active on my network, but like pseudocyber, recommend manually mapping it out. Viso is great for this.
http://www.10-strike.com/l
Lanstate (above) can map out the network for you. (Man, you could've had this software for free yesterday from the site giveawayoftheday.com)
Cheers,
Rajesh
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: pseudocyberPosted on 2007-07-11 at 08:26:20ID: 19463552
Visio Pro used to do it automagically. However, whatever you find, you really ought to do it manually - you will learn a lot more about your network, and it will be much more accurate. I would use Visio.
I would try to get SolarWinds Engineers Edition Toolset - it's about $1K. But it's awesome for network discovery and documenting networks in a spreadsheet format.
Use Visio and SolarWinds together and your network would be totally documented.
Ps. No matter what you choose - any kind of "discovery" software is going to rely on SNMP. You need to be using it and have it configured on your network for the software to work.