How to maintain network diagrams / keep up-to-date information?

Question

System administration

Anticipating your answer, I want to ask right away: is there anything other than Visio?

Everything is built from scratch, so I want to start maintaining correct data and up-to-date information about the network, servers, switches, etc. in some easy-to-read and follow-up form.

For example, at the start there are 5 servers, 3 switches, 20 cameras, 5 wifi. The most obvious thing is to take a visio to draw everything like this, after which, with an increase in the number, just constantly edit this scheme, constantly adding new objects there. But what if there are 100 cameras, then 200, the scheme will visually expand and it will be inconvenient to visually search for the desired camera in it in order to view the current data on it. The second most obvious is an excel file, where we simply enter all the necessary data in a list and just keep them there. The third, less obvious, is to raise a thread of a service like GLPI + Fussioninventory, but isn't it too cumbersome for a network diagram with up-to-date information?

What other non-obvious things do you use?

Answer 1

This is not a matter of tools, but of methodology. To answer it, you need to understand who will look at the diagrams.
My experience has shown that no one looks at detailed network diagrams: they are unnecessarily overloaded, hard to find information on them, they are huge (try to draw at least two 48-port switches with completely disabled ports on one diagram), do not support versioning, are hard to edit (try to add at least one link to the 50 shoelace diagram, I'm sure you'll have to move a lot of things), which means that they are rarely kept up to date.
Therefore, the right decision when maintaining WORKING documentation is a combination of diagrams and tables. The scheme is made one for a typical solution, and a table is added to it, taking into account ports, IP addresses, patch cords, etc.
What are detailed diagrams for?
First, they are used as connection task. For example, 12 different departments are involved in the connection, work must be coordinated with it. But if you are your own administrator and connect for yourself without involving third parties, you do not need them.
Secondly, for those support. But those. support works with a specific user. That is, she needs one service. But in small organizations, the admins themselves are those support and know everything. And are you ready to keep a separate circuit for each computer? Again, such schemes are good when several departments or companies are involved in the organization of the service. For example, in my typical scheme, 12 departments with their own network segments participate in satellite inclusions. This requires a diagram.
Thirdly, to work with external organizations. First of all, these are operators. But how often do they change? To do this, it is enough to draw one diagram once a year with four ports and forget it.
It would seem that the duty shift should look at the schemes. But she looks at the map on zabbix, nagios or other monitoring tool.
Now about the tools. They are all selected depending on the scale of the network and the number of changes in it over a certain period of time. I will list the tools that are used in order of increasing network size, frequency of changes on network elements and the number of organizations involved in these changes.
1) for very small organizations, this is draw.io for diagrams and google docs for tables.
2) further Microsoft office suite, including visio.
3) next to the office suite, a monitoring or management system is added
4) wiki engines and CMDB
5) for even larger ones, dedicated tools such as IPAM and NRI
PS This concerns working documentation. There is a different approach to executive and project management.

Answer 2

in addition to visio, there is draw.io
instead of excel, a subset of IPAM and DCMN products whose
bright open source representatives are: netbox or phpipam schemes
to draw schematically ; solutions

Answer 3

I'm using a homemade program that
1) pings all broadcast domains on all VLANs.
2) collects ARP tables (IP address - MAC address)
3) enters all switches via SSH, unloads the poppy forward table on ports. (MAC address - port)
4) collects all this data in a heap and issues an up-to-date network map in the form of a graphviz picture.

Answer 4

netbox
https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox

Answer 5

If something other than Visio?

No.
And this is extremely poignant, in the light of import substitution and everything-everything-everything. Only Visio + spreadsheet (Excel, LO Calc or whatever) with port tables.

Answer 6

There is an ancient Friendly Pinger (FPinger) program, and a bunch of newer analogues. We made a schematic in it at work, where you can also set up monitoring and all sorts of event notifications. Enough for a small network.
For LO Calc or Excel port tables.