Network Discovery Tool

A network discovery tool discovers, maps and provides an inventory of your entire infrastructure. For instance, it should give you visibility into all of your network devices, systems, deployed software, virtual assets, VLANs and port-to-port connectivity. Here at Ipswitch, we think of networks as “living entities,” since planned or unplanned changes happen all the time. IT integration of branches and locations due to mergers and acquisitions, disruptive technology like virtualization, global corporate expansions, office reallocations, purchasing of new hardware, datacenter consolidation projects- they all introduce the need for a complete re-discovery of your infrastructure, hardware assets and port to port connectivity. Establishing that device connectivity is not the source of problems is one of the first priorities when troubleshooting network issues. A layer 2/3 discovery tool is needed to identify not only the physical server and virtual resources that you have deployed in your environment and how they are mapped, but how everything is connected down to the individual port. We recommend running discovery on a periodic basis, more frequently if you are part of larger organizations, or if you have distributed network locations.

With a network discovery tool, you’ll know which resources are on your network, and the relationships between these resources. As your network grows, the network discovery tool should provide automatic discovery and mapping capabilities so you can keep up to date with the topology of your network infrastructure every step of the way.

With WhatsUp Gold you can easily discover, map, inventory and document your entire infrastructure – network devices, servers, deployed software, VMware virtual machines, VLANs and port to port connectivity – quickly and efficiently, in a matter of minutes. WhatsUp Gold leverages layer 2/3 technologies including SNMP, ARP, and SSH, along with SNMP and others to build a detailed overview of your entire network to give you actionable insight into network decisions. The layer 2 connectivity maps generated by the WhatsConnected network discovery tool eliminate the manual task of generating topology maps and give visibility into physical and IP connectivity. In addition to dynamic mapping, maps are also fully customizable from within WhatsUp Gold.