Network Topology Discovery

Iotellect Network Manager can discover network topology at layer 2 (link layer) and layer 3 (IP network layer) of OSI network model. The topology discovery is based on analyzing information collected using diverse network protocols, primarily SNMP protocol.

To allow Iotellect Network Manager successfully discover the topology links in your network, make sure that the following conditions are met:

• You've completed network device discovery based on scanning subnets of your IP networks. Another option is to manually create accounts for all or some of your network devices.

Only devices that have corresponding server-side device accounts will be shown on the topology map.

• Accounts of all devices that support SNMP, especially switches and routers, have SNMP polling enabled and SNMP community names or SNMP v3 auth credentials properly configured.
• Synchronization of all devices is successfully completed (in most case, fully synchronized devices are represented with icon in the System Tree).

The Iotellect Server is pre-configured to perform periodic network topology discovery every 5 minutes. The discovery is initiated by Network Topology Discovery scheduled job.

To disable automatic topology discovery or change its period, disable the scheduled job or change its simple schedule settings respectively.

To manually start the topology discovery, open context menu of the Server node () in System Tree and select Network Topology Discovery from Network Management submenu.

In most cases the network topology discovery will be finished in mere seconds, since all required information is already contained in server-side snapshots of network devices. Once the discovery is finished, it's possible to see the number of newly discovered and updated links in the status bar of Iotellect Client.

Network topology discovery options are available in Topology Discovery section of Network Management plugin's global settings:

• Use Routing Information (ARP). Enables ARP data usage for L3 topology discovery.
• Use Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). Enables STP data usage for L2 topology discovery.
• Use Address Forwarding Tables (ATF). Enables usage of switch/bridge ATF tables for L2 topology discovery.
• Use Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP). Enables usage of CDP data for L2 topology discovery.
• Use Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP). Enables usage of LLDP data for L2 topology discovery.

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