What are some good ways to document a network? (close please!)

Athenor

I've officially been an IT professional for 2 years now, even having some certificates under my belt. However, I'm pretty much entirely self-trained. My job is more and more requiring me to do networking style work beyond just basic troubleshooting - things like figuring out where packets are heading, why there is slowness in the network, why a firewall is blocking DHCP traffic, things like that.

While I have my eyes on learning things like Wireshark and Cisco long term, short term I need to find answers. To this end, I'd like to start mapping some of our more complex networks. This way we'll not only have documentation, but maybe if we do it right we can track down some of the wonkiness.

The problem I'm running into is finding the right tool, or using the right tool better. 9 times out of 10 when I have to do this kind of map, I'll either freehand it or use Visio. Visio is a scary mutha of a beast to me, though, mostly because I am not sure how to make the drawing tools correlate with anything. On top of that, I'm not sure if Visio can do everything I want.

There's three things I'm mainly asking for help with:

1) What's the best way to go about documenting a network in total, including things like routes, firewalls, AV, open ports (if we are feeling really spunky), and expected data flow?

2) What's the best tool for doing that, paid or free? (I tried a couple trials of programs that were automatically supposed to map. They failed spectacularly.)

3) Are there any good examples out there of what a properly mapped network should look like, or what you should be looking for?

I swear, as soon as a network starts involving subnets and multiple gateways, things turn to mush in my head, despite my understanding the logic behind what should work.

Djeet

In my experience with working with IT guys from other companies we exchange Visio diagrams to document information flows, state diagrams and networked assets. You'll only get familiarity with it if you use it. It still takes me forever to make something look good in Visio.

And then when I have to transmit this information to someone non-technical I usually have to make a Powerpoint presentation as they have trouble parsing what's going on in a Visio.

Ruckus

Visio is our go-to as well, but often we have different levels of complexity, so we'll have an overall map showing the Main Branches, another Visio for each overall City Showing the Main Branch and it's local clients, another showing the general layout of the Main Branch, another of specific portions of the Main Branch networks, all the way down to Visios showing the Cabinet layouts. The Branch I'm responsible for has about eight different Visio docs, the largest of which prints on two 11x17 sheets (items on the diagram are about 1x1" each).

And in about three months we move to an entirely new facility, integrating two other large field offices into ours, and significantly overhauling the network structure.

Yay me.

The actual rules for site to site traffic are documented in our SOG (Standard Operating Guideline), and any switches/routers/security appliances with rules not included in the SOG has it's config outputed to text and is saved in the main documentation store.

Athenor

SOG - We're trying to develop something similar called a Best Practices Matrix, but as we are a managed IT company with a ton of clients, every network is different - and only a handful were built by us. Still, we want to operate on the principle that if we were let go for whatever reason, we'd be able to pass on everything our replacement needs to be successful -- in the hopes that they will return the favor.

Are there any good example SOGs online?

SunDragon

The Practice of System and Network Administration is a great book for understanding the processes of IT and ways to implement best practices. It wont help you to understand brand specific things/configs/etc but it will teach you the why's of things like what and how to document. It's a book everyone in the admin role should read in my opinion.

As for diagraming your network, Visio as stated above is the go to tool for visualizing all the layout of the network. Collecting all the information on what to include on that diagram is a bit harder.

amateurhour

Have you signed up for TechNet from Microsoft yet? That's got a wealth of info for stuff like this. Additionally, Cisco publishes something similar and I believe that's still on a monthly basis.

Wireshark is your friend, learn it. Also for freeware mapping of a network down to the individual PC and printer level, look at the freeware version of spiceworks.

Athenor

I want to learn Wireshark in the worst way after meeting Laura Chappel. I'm going to look into that and the book there on network administration. We have technet in the office, but I do not have it personally.

Athenor

This book is amazing! I'm going to start there, and also start doing video classes on Visio. I'm also going to spread this book around the office.

The mods can close this.

TheKoolEagle

wireshark is a godsend when it comes to finding network problems, the job i've had for the last 2.5 years is basically finding network problems on remote networks that the customers cannot tell me what equipment they have or anything, its been a crash course in networking for sure

Athenor

Oh yeah. Laura presented a class, "The top 10 reasons your network sucks." She didn't talk about how to fix them, only what they were and how to identify them. And my jaw hit the floor. I would've given anything to cancel or back out of my other classes to attend the rest of her lectures. I'm hoping, after I get through my current reading *Grin* That I can convince my boss to invest in some wireshark training.

Speaking of reading: @sundragon ... I can't put this fucking thing down. I showed it to my team, and my boss bought a copy for himself and let me expense the one I bought. It's PERFECT, and lays out a lot of the issues we are having as a company that this thread was dancing around. I'm very, VERY excited to absorb this all up and see what we can do to make our company even better. What's more, we may even be turning this into a book club kind of deal with the service team.