Hello and welcome to IP Fabric webinar about network documentation, why we need it and how can our solution help you with achieving full documentation for your network infrastructure. To start off, let's look at, what are the requirements of network documentation. Essentially, what we want to achieve is, in-depth visibility of our network. We might want to do it because of, records keeping requirements, because of, ISO or ITIL, requirements of a company. It can be to record our changes to the network, what we are doing to the network, to communicate to other teams.

We might want to document the network to, present it to somebody to, who might want to gain an overview of of network infrastructure, understand how the network is connected, how, the network, operates, and what are, its components, or find a specific component in the network, essentially functioning as a search engine for the network infrastructure, finding any parameter, any specific, value, any protocol, any technology, within network. The documentation is, of course, also used for team communication and inter team communication purposes, as a deliverable to a customer and, as a proof of work or, as a communication tool, essentially. Finally, we can use documentation to plan, the next steps, what we want to do with the network, how do we want the network to evolve. So the main challenge with the documentation is that it's very labor intensive process. There are too many unknowns when creating network documentation, starting from what are you documenting, What devices are there in the network?

How many devices are there in the network? How many IP addresses, interfaces? What what do we need to document? There are so many parameters to collect and record, that you would be spending, really a lot of time collecting all of that information. Further on, the information that you will be collecting is not structured.

So the data or the network data that you collect, really requires additional organization, additional manual effort, to, structure it and make it human readable. When creating documentation, the document is becomes obsolete during the document creation process. And even if, you are very fast and efficient with it and you are able to document the whole network in a day or so, you can be, sure that within a year, the network will look different because it's a nature of networks to always change. So then the communication becomes a continuous process where you always need to, keep repeating this library as task. Finally, we want documentation to be functional.

It's it's not supposed to be just a document sitting somewhere on the drive without providing any useful information. We want to be able to compare, the old and new documents to see what has changed between them. And, of course, there are tools to differentiate documents, but there are no tools to differentiate network states. So this is where our solution comes in, where IP Fabric performs full, snapshots of network infrastructure, collect all of the parameters, on a regular basis, either, once a minute, once an hour, or once a day, Structure that in information appropriately, represent it not only in table format, but also visually or as a document export, and provide you complete version control. So if we'll look at the product itself and how the product works from the documentation point of view, We, IP Fabric creates a full network snapshot, which contains all of the information about, all of the devices, all of the individual part numbers, all of the, individual IP addresses, VLANs, make it searchable, so we can look at what what the VLANs are in our network, what are, for example, spanning tree bridges, and, find any detailed information about our network infrastructure by simply finding a technology and searching through the network.

The version control is provided by the snapshotting system, which enables us to switch between individual snapshots and have all of the detailed information for each particular point, in time. If we would want, other representative view than, than the tables, then we can simply switch to the, to the visual view, find a specific device, find a specific network. We can look at, how individual sites are set up, how the protocol interconnections operate within, within the network, and also export this information then for further use, within the team, for example, in, in a word format, to then, change appropriately according to, the team requirements. So here we've been able to very easily, generate our our Word document export, which, shows, a site overview, general site information about make and model of, equipment, family of operating systems, individual part numbers, everything that's needed to rebuild the site physically, including connectivity matrix, which, media is being used to interconnect the systems and, how layer 2 is set up, individual spanning tree domains, and then, routing domains as well, how the routings is set up in the site. So because this, everything is available in all of these formats, and, it's done on a continuous basis.

Essentially, at any point in time, you can create, a new discovery snapshot, rediscover, rediscover the network, or simply work with, any previous snapshot and always have access to the detailed information. So I hope you found this, information useful. In case you want to know more about our product, please visit ipfabric.io for more information or to request trial. Thank you.