Discussion on:

Five free apps for diagramming your network

Great free tools....are there any free tools that can scan your network and map it out for you? I have used WhatsUp Gold in the past, but its a little pricey.

There is a free tool which can do that - it's called MyNet Toolset.

Try Spiceworks - it provides simple network diagrams as well as information on installed apps on each network node. It also has a trouble ticket routine generated by the end user, making life a little easier for the "help desk". The installed apps feature is great for ensuring software license compliance.

If you want basic diagrams, and not so-basic ones, consider LibreOffice or OpenOffice. Their dwawing and slideshow apps have simple but nice diagraming features, many styles of conectors, you can move shapes around and they stay connected. Also can import shapes designed to Visio, and although they come with a very small set of default shapes there's dozens more available for free download by the community.

Other features are high-quality (for printing), web optimzed, protected and encrypted PDF export, besides export to Flash, SVG, EMF and other vector and bitmap formats.

I use them for many kinds of flowcharts and network diagrams, never felt the need for a "better" tool, but I found other tools cited in the article to be counter-intuitive or to produce very ugly diagrams.

Other option worth evaluating is the Kivio tool from KOffice. I guess the suite and the diagraming tool changed their names recently and they also got a decent Windows port. I liked it when I tried a few years ago, but LibreOffice was enough for my needs and has already supported both Windows and Linux for many years.

As hubblecat mentioned above Spiceworks will automacically diagram your network; and not only showing the network but workstations, ipaddresses, all sorts of good info. And they have a great user/support community.

Should have mentioned Graphviz and GraphVisio. Both are open source. Graphviz is a general purpose tool originalted at ATT Labs, that can represent nearly anything. GraphVisio integrates Graphviz with Visio.

http://www.graphviz.org/

Mix in a bit of Perl, Java, ksh, whatever, and you can read spreadsheets, text, logs, realtime feeds, etc. and create graphics to represent any set of objects and relationships.

CADE is a good among others

What would you recommend to analyse the existing configuration and assets on a network?

Is it me or why do I never see anyone take these drawings down to the port level? Showing that this cable is plugged into port x and that cable is plugged into port Y of that device? I guess it depends on what you need it for / who's going to use that. I do my drawing religously that way and never see anyone do that : ( (partly for me to really document the details of the network and partly for users that might get in there, unplug a cable, reconnect somewhere else and swear that they put it back where it was originally : )

A site I used to look at was http://www.ratemynetworkdiagram.com