Overview

For network administrators, knowing the up-to-date topology of a network is crucial to a number of network management tasks, such as resource management, event correlation, and root-cause analysis. Given the dynamic nature of networks, keeping track of topology information manually is a daunting task. Commercially available auto discovery software and algorithms use ping, sweep, and routing tables to discover the network, however, these methods often fail to discover large parts of the network and may also take substantial amounts of time.

The following list summarizes the various reasons why you need to discover devices and generate a topology:

  • Inventory management
  • Topology verification
  • Device/Network Maintenance
  • Device Troubleshooting
  • Device classification
  • Security
  • Path traceability

Object Organization

The Topology Service Set provides a mechanism to discover the network topology as seen by a protocol on a network element.The Topology Service Set includes the set of APIs to obtain the topology graph and also provisions to register a callback to listen to topology change events.

The Topology services defines the following objects:

  • Topology Node - Represents a node discovered from a network element.
  • Topology Node Connector - Represents the connectivity of a node to its neighbor.
  • Edge Object - Represents a path from a node to another node.
  • Graph Object - The topology graph information as seen by a protocol on a network element.
  • Topology Configuration Object - Contains the set of attributes used to discover topologies.
  • Topology Object - The object is used to obtain a topology graph and to notify events in case of topology changes.
  • Topology Event Filter object - The object is used to specify the filter criteria. If a topology change matches the specified filter criteria an event callback is generated to notify the application of the topology change.
  • Topology Event Object - Represents the event information during a topology change.

Use the following tutorials to learn how to use the Topology Service Set features.

Basic Topology Tutorial This tutorial demonstrate the basic capabilities of the Topology Service Set.