CDP Network Discovery for Weathermap
Hello,
I mostly use cacti for network trafic graphing.
We have more than a hundred network equipments and topology is frequently modified.
Manually updating network weathermap is *very* boring.
Cisco equipments use a protocol to discover each other : Cisco Discovery Protocol.
Each equipment keeps a table of its neighbors and you can request this table through SNMP.
A rapid scan of these MIBs allows you then to discover network topology.
My idea is to code a plugin that would perform several actions :
-scan CDP MIB to discover network topology from a seed device.
-create discovered devices in cacti.
-create data sources and graphs for trunk interfaces (links between network equipments).
-export topology to Howie's great Weathermap
(
http://www.network-weathermap.com/).
Now for the implementation :
-CDP discovery is easy, even with PHP. I found a class for this (not tested yet)
http://www.potato-people.com/code/docs/ ... s.php.html
-Export to weathermap is easy (text file configuration), the only problem is to provide equipments coordinates but I think Howie is working on automatic layout based on graphviz (neato) .
-The hard point I cannot solve is automatic creation of devices and graphs.
I took a look at cacti API and did not see any function for this.
Any idea ?
Does someone already work on this ?
Some other appz already do network discovery (Nedi, netdisco) but not real time graphing.
I really think this feature would be very useful for many people !
Thanks to you all.
