I think that the time for Network Diagrams is coming to a close.
- It takes large amounts of time ( and thus money) to produce diagrams.
- Maintaining diagrams is difficult, costly and something that should be automated.
- Networks are not static today. Overlays, IPsec Tunnels, VMs, virtual appliances. How can a diagram stay up to date with manual changes.
- A diagram is better than nothing but anything is better than a diagram.
- Who extracts value from a diagram ? Executives, project managers ? (Of course, you do but mostly that a by product of writing it down)
daniel himes says
May 11, 2018 at 1:33 pmAs 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.
Mrs. Y. says
May 11, 2018 at 2:26 pmHoly 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.