======= Topomap (Topology Discovery Agent)

Cisco topology discovery agent

Overview

This is a topology discovery agent that will atempt to record physical connections between servers and network hardware. At present it is limited to a single hop layer 2 adjacency to the servers it runs on.

Architecture

The topology discovery agent runs on Linux servers, for package and library requirements please refer to the dependencies section. The agent periodically scans connections to the local machine using the providers specified in the config file (currently only a single lldp provider).

The information returned from the providers is collated into a local topology map. The agent maintains a memory based local topolgy map all times, on subsequent iterations the agent will compare the new topology map against the in memory map and only commit changes if it finds changes between the two, this helps minimize database interactions.

Configuration

The configuration file is located in etc/topomap.ini. The following options are supported:

[AGENT]
# Polling interval in seconds
polling_interval = 10
# Specify interface prefixes to search on
int_prefixes = eth,en
# Specify providers
providers = topomap.providers.lldp.LLDP,
# Specify location of the pid file
pidfile = /var/run/topomap.pid
# Specify run directory
rundir = /opt/stack/topomap

[DATABASE]
# Specify DB connection string
sql_connection = mysql://root:nova@localhost/topomap?charset=utf8

[LOG]
# Log level Default: WARNING
level = debug
# Log file
file = /var/log/topomap.log

Dependencies

All library requirements are listed under tools/pip-requires. To use the lldp provider you need the linux package lldpd installed

$ apt-get install lldpd

Running the agent

To run the agent run bin/topomap. Use bin/topomap -h to find out the various options supported by the agent. The agent can run in blocking agent mode or a background daemon mode. To use the daemon mode specify the -d options when starting the agent.