The product is priced per managed device and licensed on a subscription basis (including support). The only factor we account for in the license price is the number of active network devices (switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, wireless controllers) in the target network. Wireless Access-Points are not included in the license.

The platform collects a variety of data specific to each network device. Starting with basic inventory and protocol states and detailed protocol tables or links. To provide full transparency, all operational commands used for each vendor/platform are well documented in our Support matrix.

The overall impact is very low on network resources. IP Fabric is reading all data from a device with a single SSH session in a similar way as the administrator, only faster. It is very common for IP Fabric to run discovery during business hours when little to no irregularities were observed in monitoring.

IP Fabric collects data only via Command-Line Interface (CLI) with set of known operational commands on supported network devices. Read-only access is sufficient for discovery. Additionally, the platform uses API to communicate with vendor controllers (Versa, Viptela) or cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, NSX-T). IP Fabric doesn’t collect any SNMP data from active network devices.  Our CLI–based approach, via SSH, achieves a greater level of detail compared to SNMP.

One engineer is enough to handle the task of testing. For the first network discovery, IP Fabric must be deployed with the OVA image (provided on request). The platform needs to have correct credentials to access active network devices via SSH/Telnet. The security perimeter needs to enable communication from the IP Fabric platform to network devices for mentioned CLI protocols. Optionally, you can provide a single IP address as a starting point for discovery.

The IP Fabric platform collects data from the network on a regular basis to provide in-depth analytics. The output of the data collection is a digital snapshot of the entire network at the time of discovery. IP Fabric does not monitor the network in real-time like traditional monitoring tools, but provides deeper insights. It integrated with many popular monitoring tools (e.g. Zabbix, PRTG) to add key context.