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Today we’re going to answer a question I’ve been asked a lot over the years: How do you know if you can trust your source of truth? Or perhaps more grimly: have you ever seen a source of truth you can trust?
Most organizations don’t have a single source of truth; they have several. Some data lives in your monitoring tool, while other data lives in your CMDB, your IPAM, and maybe even an Excel sheet or two. Each “source of truth” only shows you a fragment of your network, and it’s up to you to piece it all together.
If this sounds like you, it might be time to ask yourself:
- How consistent is your data between these sources?
- How are you keeping this data up to date?
Not sure how to answer these questions? You’re not alone. At the enterprise scale, it can be near impossible to maintain an accurate source of truth—especially if you’re manually updating a Visio diagram.
If you fall behind on day-to-day updates, you’ll end up with data that you can’t trust. And if your company embarks on a major digital transformation—perhaps a merger or acquisition—you’ll need to discover this new environment from scratch. Either way, the result is the same: you’re only guessing what you have running in your network.
Watch the full 40-minute Cisco Live session on how to “Fix the Source of Truth Problem.”
What Happens If You Can’t Trust Your Network Discovery?
Recently a customer came to me, knowing that they had a problem with their CMDB accuracy. However, they didn’t know the full extent of it.
After running their first network discovery with IP Fabric, they found that roughly 10% of their CMDB was outdated or incorrect. In an enterprise environment like theirs, that 10% could be hundreds or even thousands of devices. The impact of that inaccuracy was adding up, costing them:
- Time: slower troubleshooting and longer change windows.
- Risk: unknown dependencies linked to outages and rollbacks.
- Money: phantom inventory, incorrect contracts, and wasted renewals.
Each of these operational costs ladder up to larger business impacts like:
- Longer service outages, which can cause millions in revenue loss.
- Compliance penalties for violating security or regulatory frameworks.
- Reputational damage, if there’s a delay in delivering critical services.
Your network is the backbone of your business, and you don’t want that backbone to be built on guesswork.
Learn more about the “Hidden Bill” of bad network data.
What Does “Good” Network Discovery Look Like?
Network visibility depends on discovery, and discovery depends on tooling. A good network discovery tool should be able to tell you:
- That all your devices are being monitored.
- That all your security and regulatory controls are documented and working as intended.
- How a change will affect your network behavior (before you actually make it).
- Where to start troubleshooting when an outage occurs.
In order to give you this data, your tool needs to be able to discover your network continuously. After all, networks are always changing. Maybe a new device gets added here, or a configuration is changed there. With each change, your documentation is drifting further from your actual network.
At the risk of sounding like every other IT expert out there, there’s only one way to keep up: automation.
How Do You Automate Network Discovery?
What you see below may look like a network diagram, but it’s not.
This is a snapshot of an actual network that was discovered using IP Fabric.
When taking a snapshot, IP Fabric automatically:
- Discovers every device, connection, and configuration in your network.
- Maps the relationships and dependencies between devices.
- Normalizes that information, and uses it to build an interactive digital twin model of your network.
- Verifies all network data with a series of built-in and custom checks.
- Pushes the verified network data to any and all tools in your network ecosystem.
Unlike your traditional Visio diagram, which will go out of date the moment you click “save,” an IP Fabric snapshot is updated several times per day. Since it’s automated, you also don’t have to worry about human foibles like mistyped device numbers or duplicate entries.
How Do We Solve the “Source of Truth” Problem?
At IP Fabric, we believe that the only way to get accurate network data is by looking at the network itself. Our platform makes it easy to gather that data, so you can feed it into your chosen source of truth. For example, our customers use IP Fabric data to fuel tools like:
Let’s see a step-by-step of how IP Fabric pushes network data to one of these tools in particular: NetBox.
Step 1: Run a Snapshot
IP Fabric kicks off the discovery process by using CLI commands and API calls to communicate with vendors, pinpointing all their devices and known neighbors until 100% of them are found. From there, the platform also maps out each device’s connections and configurations, automatically checking them against your business intent. You can choose to create your own custom checks or deploy IP Fabric’s series of 160+ built-in checks, which are based on standards for leading security and regulatory frameworks.
The results of your snapshot and intent checks are then presented in a normalized, user-friendly GUI, like so:
Learn more about IP Fabric’s intent checks.
Step 2: Push the Snapshot Data via API
IP Fabric and NetBox have collaborated on a plugin that automatically pushes IP Fabric’s network data to NetBox. That data can easily be queried either via API or NetBox’s GUI.
Learn more about IP Fabric’s integration with NetBox Cloud.
Step 3: Scan For Inconsistencies
The plugin automatically creates a new branch in NetBox, and highlights any differences between this newest IP Fabric snapshot and your NetBox source of truth.
Maybe you see an IP address that’s configured a certain way in NetBox, but it’s been manually changed on a device. This creates a conflict of information, where your source of truth tells you one thing, but your network is telling you another.
Maybe that IP address was changed for a reason, or maybe it was an accident. In this case, a human or AI agent can step in to correct the situation—and with the depth of insights from IP Fabric, they’ll know exactly where to start their investigation.
Learn how to de-risk change management.
Step 4: Remediate Configuration Drift
Now you know exactly what’s drifted. But before you remediate the issue, you can run and end-to-end path lookup in IP Fabric to simulate the effect the change will have on your network. You can also run another snapshot after implementing the change, to ensure it had the intended effect. From there, IP Fabric will automatically sync with your NetBox source of truth.
Learn more about end-to-end path lookups.
Finally, A Reliable Network Source of Truth
As enterprise networks continue to scale, it may be time to reconsider how we think of a “network source of truth.” It shouldn’t be a document or a spreadsheet you maintain, but rather a continuous feedback loop based on your network’s actual behavior.
So, back to our original question: have you ever seen a source of truth you can actually trust? Now with IP Fabric, the answer can finally be “Yes.”
Try IP Fabric yourself with our self-guided demo, or dive right in with a free trial today.
FAQS
How Does Network Discovery Impact Operations?
Without an accurate source of truth, routine tasks become heavier lifts than they should be. Take change management, for example: if your documentation is outdated, you're pushing changes based on incomplete information and opening yourself up to surprises down the line. The same problem shows up during compliance audits; if you can’t trust your documentation, you can’t trust what you’re handing to an auditor.
When your network data is trustworthy, both of those situations look very different. You can push a change and know that it won’t cause an outage or performance issue. You can give an auditor a timestamped report that shows all your security and regulatory policies are operating as intended. These may seem like small wins in the short term, but over time they ladder up to millions in savings.
How Does Network Discovery Impact Incident Response?
If an incident occurs, your first two questions are normally:
- What caused the incident?
- What’s been affected?
On one hand, if you don’t have a reliable view of your network, it can take days to re-document it before you can even begin your investigation. That delay can be costly; depending on your industry, every hour of downtime can range from roughly $39,000 to $2 million in lost revenue.
On the other hand, if you have trustworthy network data, you can avoid this delay entirely. This not only means faster triage and remediation, but also a cleaner audit trail for any regulatory reporting that follows.
How Does Network Discovery Impact AI & Automation?
There are so many tools out there for AI and automation. But no matter how good the tool is, it’s not reliable unless it’s equipped with accurate network data.
For AI to perform, it needs data that’s:
- Clean
- Structured
- Contextualized
- Accessible
With this foundation in place, AI agents can be trusted to make changes faster, with fewer errors and less need for human oversight. This reduces the risk of rollbacks, and gives the network team more time to spend on work that benefits more from human input.
How Is IP Fabric Different Than a Monitoring Tool or CMDB?
As a network digital twin platform, IP Fabric sits upstream of your monitoring tools and CMDBs. It discovers and maps your actual network behavior at that current moment in time, and pushes that verified data into the tools your teams are already using. As a result, every team and tool in your ecosystem will be informed by the most accurate and up-to-date picture of your network, helping them to make more well-informed decisions for your business.
