Good Morning All. I’m looking for a good and inexpensive network topology mapping application. I’ve looked at Solarwinds. And although that appears to do the job, it is Very Expensive for a Church. Any Recommendation?
There’s a decent amount of legwork required to get good network maps, but if you’re ready to do the legwork (you probably should have a manual diagram first to validate the diagram) there area few options out there.
- Netdisco - Pretty much the industry standard, but not that easy to work with (IMO).
- LibreNMS - A pretty good all-in-one network monitoring tool with alerting and a basic topology view. This is my go-to recommendation for someone who is just getting into the monitoring game as it’s got some pretty sane defaults and is pretty lightweight and easy to work with.
- LanTopoLog - Free/Super Cheap app to get some pretty decent network topology information quickly.
Keep in mind these all depend on having SNMP and LLDP configured and not having unmanaged switches in your environment (or at least not in the middle of your environment).
Auvik is a tool that’s available from many service providers on a subscription basis based on the number of managed network devices in an environment. Fully hosted, years of retention and logging, automated live network map generation. It generally requires significantly less effort to deploy than many of the alternatives such as those @codatory mentioned, or things like Solarwinds NMS or PRTG, which while very nice, are not cheap or easy to set up. Auvik also does regular configuration backups with history, and has many configurable alerts–plus you’re monitoring your environment from outside (with an inside collector agent–but it does internet connectivity monitoring as well to their datacenter from the collector).
Several Church IT Network partners (us included) both use and offer Auvik solutions.