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You are here: Home / Blogs / Video: Two Beer Networking – Whats Wrong With Network Diagrams ?

Video: Two Beer Networking – Whats Wrong With Network Diagrams ?

Greg Ferro May 10, 2018

I think that the time for Network Diagrams is coming to a close.

  1. It takes large amounts of time ( and thus money) to produce diagrams.
  2. Maintaining diagrams is difficult, costly and something that should be automated.
  3. Networks are not static today. Overlays, IPsec Tunnels, VMs, virtual appliances. How can a diagram stay up to date with manual changes.
  4. A diagram is better than nothing but anything is better than a diagram.
  5. Who extracts value from a diagram ? Executives, project managers ? (Of course, you do but mostly that a by product of writing it down)

2 Comments

About Greg Ferro

Human Infrastructure for Data Networks. 25 year survivor of Corporate IT in many verticals, many tens of employers working on a wide range of networking solutions and products.

Host of the Packet Pushers Podcast on data networking at https://packetpushers.net - now one of the largest networking podcasts on the Internet.

Microblog: http://etherealmind.com
Personal blog: http://gregferro.com

Comments

  1. daniel himes says

    May 11, 2018 at 1:33 pm

    As someone who has come into complex networks and data centers with basically no network diagrams/documentation I can say there is a lot of value in network diagrams. I’ll agree that it should be automated (even written some stuff to automate it), but I run into this issue all the time: I am 300 miles away from the data center, there is a firewall/non-CDP device I can’t get into/though… There is no network diagram to find what’s on the other side… What do I do from here? I’ve had outages where a device that wasn’t in a diagram was over loaded, but it wasn’t in a diagram so no one knew it was there, so we couldn’t find where the data was dying. Also had to re-design a bunch of stuff that was ducktapped together with static routes all over the place, but none of them were documented as to where they were/what they were. Took forever to track down where what was.

    Reply
  2. Mrs. Y. says

    May 11, 2018 at 2:26 pm

    Holy crap, this is completely accurate. I just want to see a friggin’ design similar to what application developers do, with process and data flows, so I can follow the path. What I end up with is a complete mess that’s almost impossible to read.

    Reply

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