Network administration

[InDenial]

Hi all,

Not sure if this is the right forum, but I am gonna put something here anyway.

My workfield is network management. The networks we manage differ from a couple of switches/routers to 100's of switches and routers.

We have a big database with network configuration information in it wich is linked to a ticket system. The database interface (ticket system) is not really user friendly when you want to find information quickly. Because of that we started making network "drawings". We made those drawings in Excel. Might sound stupid but in the beginning we managed networks based on our concepts and those concepts were straight forward and excel sheets worked for us.

For some time now we are managing more complex networks and the excel sheets just do not work anymore. So I am looking for a way to create drawings in another way.

So.. I was wondering if there were people willing to discuss their experiences in network administration. How do you do it and why do you do it that way?


InDenial

 

[galli]

Hi

I am not in network admin, however I do design small business networks, I have found the best program for drawing networks is Visio, mainly because you can get the cisco symbols for the Routers and switches etc....

Hope this helps

 

[InDenial]

Visio does not work for us.. I saw an option where you could do en export to visio in CiscoWorks but we do not only use cisco devices..

I have never tried it and will try once to see what the result is.. I am not sure that it will show enough information on the network.

Besides cisco switches we also use 3com, Nortel, Ip-mux (voice to ethernet converters) and Axxessit (sdh to ethernet converters) and DRG's (some kind of modems with Fiber interfaces).

The problem is that all these devices are connected to eachother in some way.

I have to say that, for a big part of our network, we are going to create a new database and since we have the option to tell how we want things to be registered this is a big step forward.

It remains to be seen if the interface between the Database and the ticket system is going to improve.


InDenial