Documentation Tools

Every picture tells a story, but some storytellers are better than others at certain genres. The same is true of network-documentation tools. An enterprise with a horror story of tangled wiring will have different needs from those starting with a blank slate. To see how well these tools work with a network redesign, we took products from Altima Technologies, Fluke Networks, Microsoft, Netformx and netViz to a real New York ad agency with a large, heterogeneous network. The offerings displayed a wide array of features, with no real flops.

Netformx's Network Designer won our Editor's Choice award thanks to its flair for design and strong autodiscovery. Microsoft's Visio showed a very broad but shallow range of capabilities, Fluke Network Inspector's claim to fame is its Layer 2 discovery, and netViz's strength is its database integration. As for Altima, its NetZoom 2000 is in a class by itself, with more than 35,000 shapes and frequent updates (see "NetZoom Shapes Up as a Good Buy").

Whether you're a network manager with a rat's nest of wiring to sort out, an out-sourcer needing to fill in a sketchy diagram or a designer building a network from scratch, one of these tools can draw the blueprints you need.