During a conversation with one of our trusted partners at the Atmosphere conference last year, they said something that resounded greatly with me: “A picture paints a thousand words.” I believe this holds especially true in the field of network management.
Role of the network topology diagram
The goal of a network topology diagram is to provide a visual representation of the physical and logical connectivity for intuitive network design, monitoring of network-wide health, and correlation of disparate data for troubleshooting. With growing network complexity, most network management tools struggle to come up with intuitive ways (tables, graphs, etc.) to provide the right level of context and represent relevant information in a unified view.
Let’s look at an example of an IT administrator at a large university who has received multiple reports of network outages from different students in a short period of time. Without a clear topology diagram, they have no way of understanding how widespread (or isolated) the issue is. This is why the topology diagram is becoming a key feature in most tools as the natural starting point for network administrators to monitor and troubleshoot workflows.
An effective topology map should provide an intuitive way to visualize and identify where an issue has occurred and allow the quick correlation of multiple issues to a single root cause. To enable this, the topology diagram should allow administrators to get to the right context quickly and easily starting at the “birds-eye view” and drilling down into the right context as required.
In fact, the emphasis on human-centered UX design has also resulted in innovative use cases such as topology-aided workflows for network provisioning, deploying configuration changes at scale, and so on.
Challenges with traditional network topology diagrams
The traditional “tree” network topology diagrams have long been the de facto method of depicting network connectivity across multiple network management tools. While these diagrams work well for branch and distributed enterprise deployments, some of the biggest challenges with these topology diagrams and why they do not work well for larger campus deployments are below:
- Limited scale: Traditional network diagrams are not able to graphically scale to meet the requirements for most campus deployments—which usually have thousands of devices and tens of thousands of endpoints. Users are left looking at only a part of the network, leading to a lack of the full picture.
- Rigid layout: Traditional network diagrams are rigid in nature and typically only allow the changing of the position of devices along a single axis; these layout changes are usually non-persistent.
- Ineffective depiction of hierarchy: Tree diagrams poorly depict the relationships between the different layers of the network, especially in the case of redundancy and multi-path scenarios.
- Lack of virtual elements and endpoint visibility: This causes gaps in the topology and hampers end-to-end troubleshooting of issues.
‘Sunburst’ and ‘chord’ topology in next-generation Central: bird’s eye to drilled-down views for intuitive troubleshooting and workflows
The next generation of Central introduces the game-changing sunburst and chord diagrams for network topology visualization, using the latest innovations in user experience design.
The sunburst is an intelligent blend of the physical and logical network connectivity of a site or global network which:
- Depicts hierarchies, or the different tiers of the network, using concentric circles, and enables large network visualization, overcoming the node and link overload that traditional “tree” diagrams face.
- Enables robust network state monitoring with the concept of “layers”, which allow a plethora of physical and logical elements such as Device Health, VLANs, VXLAN tunnels, Client Density, AP Radio Integrity to be overlayed on top of the sunburst.
- Allows drill down to specific parts of the network by changing the center of the sunburst, and further customization based on their use cases by adjusting reference points.
Figure 1: Sunburst topology in next-generation Central
Some examples or use cases of the benefits of the sunburst diagram include:
- Ability to scale even in a large site with thousands of devices by maximizing screen real estate to provide proper visualization for all devices. Multiple tiers of devices can be displayed in the screen around the center of the sunburst.
- Identify problematic areas with just a single glance to aid troubleshooting. For example, an administrator can easily isolate problems to a section of the network based on the health of devices in that section, reducing the time taken to root cause issues.
- Quickly navigate to a specific device for detailed troubleshooting. For example, when an AP is down, in a single click, troubleshooting workflows can be triggered from the sunburst.
- Deeper insights using the layers. For example, the Client density layer can signal possible client congestion and the VLAN layer can show possible configuration mismatches.
In addition to the sunburst diagram, next-generation Central also provides the 'chord’ diagram to give users the ability to drill down on physical and logical connection details for specific network devices. The chord diagram provides state of the links between network devices such as the link health and neighbor information. It can also provide information regarding logical links such as VXLAN tunnels and Link Aggregation Group (LAG) links. Together with the sunburst diagram, the chord diagram provides a holistic view of the network for intuitive monitoring and troubleshooting workflows.
Figure 2: Chord Topology in next-generation Central
The innovative sunburst and chord topology diagrams are just one of the ways in which the next generation of HPE Aruba Networking Central reimagines network operations with an AI-powered, operator-centric experience.
Here’s an exclusive demo of next-generation Central we recently did for our Airheads Community. Sign in to watch on-demand!
