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Inventory

Overview

The inventory provides an overview list of sites, devices, modules, interfaces, and users discovered within the network, together with the applications that run on top of it.

Sites

The site inventory provides an overview of discovered sites, the number of devices and users present at each site. It enables the generation of site-specific reports and diagrams. Sites are automatically calculated based on the administrative domain boundaries, such as carrier networks and other unmanaged infrastructure. A single unmanaged traceroute hop is not considered a site boundary; therefore, unmanaged infrastructure is reconstructed from the probes. The specific method of site boundary calculation can be changed in the settings.

An unknown site is either a collection of isolated devices or when a device forms a single-device site.

Devices

The device inventory represents all logical managed network infrastructure devices that have been discovered and analyzed. Each entry provides the following information (Human Readable Name (apiColumnName)):

  • Hostname (hostname) is the device’s short name.
  • Hostname original (hostnameOriginal) is the original hostname acquired from the device.
  • Hostname processed (hostnameProcessed) is the hostname parsed from the original hostname (if no parsing occurs, it is the same as hostnameOriginal); when applicable – logical device name – e.g., firewall context or vsys name – can be added as a suffix to the hostname.
  • FQDN (fqdn) is the device fully qualified domain name (hostnameProcessed.domain).
  • Domain (domain) is the device’s domain name.
  • Site (siteName) is the logical grouping to which the device belongs, while single-site or isolated devices belong to an unknown site.
  • Routing domain (rd) is an IP Fabric-generated separation based on the contiguous layer 3 routing domain to which the device belongs.
  • Switching domain (stpDomain) is an IP Fabric-generated separation based on the contiguous layer 2 switching domain to which the device belongs.
  • Serial Number (snHw) is the device’s serial number.
  • Unique serial number (sn) is the serial number IP Fabric assigns to the device. This can differ from the Hardware SN, especially in cases of virtualized equipment.
  • Vendor (vendor) is the device’s vendor.
  • Family (family) is the device’s software family.
  • Platform (platform) is the device’s hardware platform.
  • Model (model) is the device’s model.
  • Login IPv4 (loginIpv4) is the IPv4 address used to connect to the device.
  • Login IPv6 (loginIpv6) is the IPv6 address used to connect to the device.
  • Management Protocol (loginType) is the protocol used to connect to the device.
  • MAC Address (mac) is the device’s MAC address.
  • Uptime (uptime) is the time since the device’s last boot.
  • Reload Reason (reload) is the reason why the device has booted.
  • Image (image) is the path to the operating system image file.
  • Version (version) is the operating system with which the device is running.
  • Configuration Register (configReg) is the Configuration Register set on the device.
  • Processor (processor) is the hardware CPU family name.
  • Memory Total (memoryTotalBytes) is the total amount of RAM memory available on the device.
  • Memory Used (memoryUsedBytes) is the amount of RAM memory in use at the time of discovery.
  • Memory % (memoryUtilization) is the utilization of RAM memory at the time of discovery (memoryUsedBytes / memoryTotalBytes).
  • Type (devType) is a logical Device Type that IP Fabric assigns to the device (i.e., a Firewall is labeled fw and a Wireless Access Point as ap). This is used for internal decisions such as the device icon to display in diagrams and cannot be changed. To set a custom type, please see Device Attributes.
  • Object Id (objectId) is a Unique ID for API devices used during discovery.
  • Ts Discovery Start (tsDiscoveryStart) is the timestamp when device discovery starts.
  • Ts Discovery End (tsDiscoveryEnd) is the timestamp when device discovery ends.
  • Discovery Duration (secDiscoveryDuration) is the duration of device discovery in seconds.

API-only columns:

  • id is the unique ID for the row of data.
  • taskKey is a UUID used to download the specific device log file for a snapshot.

Modules and Part Numbers

The part numbers inventory provides information about every identifiable module through device inventories.

OS Versions

The operating system versions inventory provides an overview of the unique operating systems used in the network and their variations.

Interfaces

The interface inventory provides information about every unique network interface discovered and includes information such as state, description, speed, duplex, and media type.

Hosts

The hosts’ inventory provides information about every discovered host and user utilizing network infrastructure. A host is any unique IP or MAC address, or an IP/MAC tuple, that is not part of the network infrastructure. The following rules may prevent the inclusion of IP addresses from the ARP in the Hosts’ inventory:

  • There cannot be any route pointing to that interface.
  • No CDP/LLDP information should be coming from that IP.
  • The MAC shouldn’t be in the OUI flagged as “Enabled for Discovery”.

Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Interfaces

The Virtual Machines (/inventory/hosts/virtual-machines) and Virtual Machine Interfaces (/inventory/hosts/virtual-machines-interfaces) tables are device-centric inventory tables, currently populated with VMware NSX-T data only. No feature flag is required to access them.

These tables replace the existing /technology/cloud/endpoints location for VMware virtual machine data. When you enable the New Cloud Model feature flag, VMware entries no longer appear in the old location. Those tables are moving away from a device-centric model.

Applications

The application inventory adds application-level context to the network data IP Fabric already collects. It is built from Application Infrastructure Mapping (AIM) data – applications, their workloads, the flows between those workloads, and the network devices that carry the traffic – and is presented as four tables:

  • Applications – the applications known to IP Fabric, with their workload, flow, and device counts.
  • Workloads – the individual endpoints that make up each application.
  • Flows – the observed communication between two workloads.
  • Devices – the network devices a flow’s traffic traverses, identified by an on-demand path-lookup calculation.

The Applications and Flows tables also let you start that path-lookup calculation, and to open the resulting path as a diagram.

AIM data reaches IP Fabric from a third-party integration such as Illumio, from records maintained in the Discovery Settings, or through the AIM API. Configuring those sources is described in Application Mapping.

Application mapping requires an AIM license

Without the AIM feature on your product license, Inventory → Applications shows an overview of the capability instead of the tables.

For a detailed description of each table, its columns, and the path-lookup actions, see Applications.

End of Life Milestones

EoX reports provide an overview of the announced end-of-life milestones. Network infrastructure vendors use end-of-life milestones to communicate stages of the product life cycle, allowing sufficient time to migrate to next-generation products.

IP Fabric currently collects EoL information on the following Vendors:

  • Arista
  • Aruba Networks
  • Check Point
  • Cisco
  • Cisco Meraki
  • Extreme
  • F5
  • Fortinet
  • HP/H3C/3COM
  • Juniper
  • Palo Alto
  • Riverbed