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First, discovery must find all physical devices in the
network that are accessible via some management interface,
such as IOS, SNMP, TL1, and so on. Then each device’s
management interface for all vendor-specific details about
components and capabilities are queried. The result of this
query is a list of all core and edge devices in the network.
To find a network’s soft assets, it is necessary to
look at its topology. A complete discovery solution must look
at all physical and logical connections among the hard assets.
It must look at the state of the connectivity and provisioning
that exists in the network from the view of the devices’
management interfaces. All of the independent information
from each device must be correlated to represent the topological
picture of connectivity as it is actually functioning during
a particular slice in time. Topology information can bring
higher capacity utilization and more accurate cost management
to the network.
Informing and improving other systems.
A flexible discovery solution should provide a portable
data file format for storing an image of the network. A
good discovery solution should provide XML data export to
support other information systems and the XML output should
represent all known information about the discovered network.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are another means
by which systems communicate. While there are advantages
to using an API for sharing discovered information, software
integration efforts associated with APIs are generally slower
and more expensive than the XML approach.
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