While its common knowledge that having up-to-date, detailed documentation of managed networks is good practice, the reality is that all too often the resources either aren’t available or can’t be spared from other tasks to meet this standard.  With all that is happening day-in-day-out throughout the average NOC environment, accurate network drawings can provide a world of difference in helping to provide the context to easily understand and evaluate the network before any action can be taken.  It’s quite simple, the faster you can understand the faster you can react, plan, and support the auto-pilot operation of the network.

While network performance data collection has long since been automated, the time to interpret it all and transform it into meaningful drawings or views of the network still remains largely prohibitive.  But what if this last piece could also be automated? How would it change how we see and use network documentation as an ongoing best practice for effective network management?

Here are some ideas:

• Schedule snapshots of your network at defined intervals, whenever you add a device or whenever you institute an engineering change
• Record compliance of implemented changes or modifications to policies
• Perform “in-the-field” assessments of prospective and active customer networks
• Add detail and specificity to customer proposals and reports to upper management
• Create views of impaired network devices/segments to expedite the discovery of what’s going wrong