As former British politician Amber Rudd once said: “Automation is driving the decline of banal and repetitive tasks.”
The UK Home Secretary was referring to national security projects, tasks and solutions that were being replaced by automated processes, machinery, and software. But she was also referencing the need to review time-consuming, trivial, and monotonous tasks and search for efficient alternatives.
This concept can be applied to every industry today. Automated driving will revolutionize the auto industry, surgeries will soon be performed by robots, and plants will be grown and harvested without human intervention.
The replacement of mundane and repetitive tasks is the goal of any efficient organization and society. One such task is the creation and maintenance of network maps that need updating whenever a change is made to the network. It's a task usually assigned to an IT technician. At the risk of upsetting my industry colleagues, but someone has to say it, manual map creation is dull and repetitive, and it's a task that should have been automated years ago.
Network administrators have been tasked with manually producing network maps since networks were first created. Map designer tools were built in response to this need, but the responsibility was still on the creator to accurately portray their network.
Fast forward to today: government regulations have required network maps to be periodically created for security purposes. NIST 800-171 and the US Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) assessment both require a documented System Security Plan (SSP), which cannot be accomplished without a network map. The technicians that build these maps expend every effort to ensure their veracity, but when network maps are manually created, the process is time-consuming, labor-intensive, prone to error, and the results quickly become out of date.
Paessler PRTG UVexplorer is a separately installed extension to PRTG that provides a complete automated network mapping solution. It discovers all Layer 2 and Layer 3 devices on your network, which is no small feat. Network mapping is a cat-and-mouse game with hardware that network administrators have sourced from known and unknown manufacturers. By implementing industry-standard protocols including SNMP, WMI, and SSH, as well as proprietary methods, Paessler PRTG UVexplorer automatically discovers all networked devices and displays the topology in a detailed visual map.
Displaying such a map is only one aspect of Paessler PRTG UVexplorer. It also captures your complete device inventory and device configurations. And to make your job easier as a network administrator, it includes an IP/MAC Finder, Service Port Scanner, and Layer 2 Tracing.
You can even view the interfaces connected to a device:
These tools and features work together to provide one solution for many of your network management tasks. And we haven't even discussed the benefit of viewing dynamic sensors in Paessler PRTG yet. I'll get to that shortly.
Paessler PRTG UVexplorer is available through a web-based management console, installed on-premises, which provides storage and access to an unlimited number of network maps. The console requires a lightweight agent to be installed on each network and enables all the features available in Paessler PRTG UVexplorer. Users can log into the console and view all their networks in one central display.
The console incorporates role-based access control (RBAC) for clients, technicians, and administrators to view, download, and access network device data and maps. These roles can also be defined and implemented through integration with Active Directory services.
Viewing the resulting network maps in Paessler PRTG UVexplorer is convenient, but if you need to share topology diagrams with other platforms, it supports exporting to PDF and SVG formats, and maps can be sent directly into Lucidchart, Visio, and PRTG.
To make the PRTG experience even better, Paessler PRTG UVexplorer exports Layer 2 maps and device data directly into your PRTG console. The maps and reports can be found in the 'Devices' area of the PRTG console under the 'UVX Map' and 'UVX Reports' tabs.
Here is an example of a network discovered by Paessler PRTG UVexplorer and imported into PRTG. Every device is color-coded to reflect the status of the assigned PRTG sensors displayed on the Layer 2 map.
The dynamic reflection of PRTG sensor status allows network administrators to visually identify network problems at a glance. From there, they can drill into any device to see what the sensor issue is, all within the PRTG console.
This provides an easy view of network issues and can make troubleshooting and repair significantly faster.
If automated topology mapping were all Paessler PRTG UVexplorer offered, it would already merit serious consideration for any PRTG user. But there's more.
Paessler PRTG UVexplorer backs up device configurations, including switch configuration scripts, and stores them as part of every scheduled discovery. Discoveries can be scheduled on an hourly, daily, weekly, or ad-hoc basis.
This means you no longer need multiple tools for Layer 2 Mapping and configuration management. UVexplorer provides both in its simple interface. The configurations are captured during every scheduled discovery. The discoveries can be scheduled on an hourly, daily, weekly or ad-hoc basis. When a configuration has been changed, UVexplorer will send an email notification to you.
Not only that but UVexplorer will also help you find what has changed between the two configuration scripts. Simply open the changed script and use the “Diff Tool” to compare it to the previous script. In this example the change is highlighted in yellow:
The network administrator can then roll back the configuration to a previous state, if required. Thanks to UVexplorer’s tight integration with PRTG, config management tasks can be performed directly from the PRTG console.
This access to the diff viewer, can be performed directly from the PRTG console.
Beyond configuration backup, Paessler PRTG UVexplorer also tracks topology changes between scheduled discoveries. When differences are detected, such as a new device, a changed connection, or a missing link, it can alert your team so nothing slips through unnoticed. This change tracking capability is especially valuable during troubleshooting: knowing what changed before an incident is often the fastest path to resolution.
Having a single platform for Layer 2 mapping, configuration backup, and change tracking removes the need to jump between applications, saving time and reducing complexity.
When discovering network devices, Paessler PRTG UVexplorer captures all asset information to create a complete inventory report. The data captured includes device name, IP address, description, location, serial number, model, and hardware/software/firmware versions.
These reports can be exported in PDF, HTML, DOCX, XLS(X), CSV, and other formats for use in purchasing systems or compliance documentation.
And once again, this report is available directly in PRTG, so you have one location for all your data.
Layer 2 mapping, dependency visualization, configuration backup and change tracking, and asset inventory are four components that work together inside Paessler PRTG UVexplorer to give you a complete picture of your network: what's connected, what changed, and what's at risk.
Together, they answer the questions that matter most during an incident:
Paessler PRTG UVexplorer is frequently updated with new device support, features, and functionality with every release.
Manual tasks can only be removed when the replacement is a trusted, fully automated solution. Adding a semi-automated solution that still requires manual adjustment and changes provides some cost-savings but can cause headaches, knowledge gaps and potential performance failures.
When a fully automated solution removes all manual tasks, without creating headaches, an organization will see value, profit, and considerable labor savings. UVexplorer, with its detailed Layer 2 maps, expertise in network discovery, and direct integration with PRTG is an ideal solution for automated network map generation and can help reduce the burden of banal and repetitive tasks.
Manual tasks can only be replaced when the replacement is a trusted, fully automated solution. A semi-automated solution that still requires manual adjustment provides some cost savings but can cause headaches, knowledge gaps, and potential performance failures.
When a fully automated solution removes all manual tasks without creating new ones, an organization sees real value: time savings, reduced complexity, and a network documentation baseline that's always current.
Paessler PRTG UVexplorer, with its automated topology maps, dependency visualization, configuration backup and change tracking, and asset inventory, is an ideal extension to PRTG for teams that want to stop maintaining network documentation by hand and start spending that time on work that actually matters.
Paessler PRTG UVexplorer is a separately installed extension to PRTG that adds automated network topology, dependency visualization, configuration backup, change tracking, and asset inventory, all accessible directly from your PRTG console.