Discovery of existing IP network devices and links is essential to proper network management and control. How can you perform the discovery with the minimal initial information required?
While you are approaching an existing network that you know very little of, you usually spend a lot of time getting as much information as possible before you even look at and touch the network itself. You can study the documentation (if any), get the inventory lists, try to understand the topology and design, downloading configurations, gather IP ranges, ask for administrator privileges, etc. This can be a cumbersome process even if all involved people cooperate. And usually, the responsible people will not be happy about granting full access to the network for the discovery.
You can apply brute force reconnaissance methods as well — such as blindly scanning whole private IP ranges or trying to contact any IP address that goes around in your packet scanner. However, this is not something that you would like to see in a business critical network.
With the IP Fabric platform, you can start the network discovery right away without wasting any time or threatening your network by using a single set of read-only network access credentials only.
You do not need to define any seed devices or scanning ranges in most networks. You do not even need the full privileges as you are gathering operational data for the discovery only.
Discovery algorithms of the IP Fabric platform can use as little of initial information as available and still produce valid and useful results to support the proper network management and control.
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