SoftPerfect Switch Port Mapper
For a handful of reasons I am typically looking for tools that will literally VISUALIZE the physical topology as a MAP, but I must admit sometimes you’re just looking for the information. Enter tools like SoftPerfect’s Switch Port Mapper. I suspect there are dozens and dozens of tools like it that can leverage SNMP to crawl the MAC and VLAN tables of Layer 2 Switches and ARP caches of Layer 3 switches to present the information below in a GUI or CLI in a table format. I’m only calling this particular one out as it’s one I tried yeaaaaaaars ago and it’s results were accurate.
PROs
It’s crazy affordable. At $49 for a single license, it’s probably the least expensive vendor-neutral tool in this blog series. It’s not often this category includes an option you can swipe a credit card for.
Looking at the changelog, it seems to be under steady development with a few updates a year. You can tell reading some of those entries that they’re regularly doing the work of accommodating new/additional switch vendors. I was particularly intrigued to see this forum post, where a prospect was trialing the software and not getting the desired info out of a certain brand switch, SoftPerfect replied to the post within less than 2 hours asking the prospect to provide some info, and then within one week had released a new version of the software that had the brand incorporated. As I’ve mentioned in Post 3 of the series, trying to perform this function across multiple switch vendors is a challenging game and seeing a public facing example of someone doing it, and with some impressive speed, is cool!
CONs
As mentioned in the intro, it doesn’t produce a “map.”
It’s not a live or polling view of the information. Information is only collected and displayed on-demand.
Closing Thoughts
This is a perfect example of a tool which perhaps doesn’t do or present all the things the way I ideally want, but can get me info others can’t and seems to be regularly working to improve their compatibility in what we already know through this series is a challenging landscape. I haven’t used this one in many years but we’re actually going to try it in the lab soon against a few different vendors and maybe test out this whole working-with-them thing if any of them doesn’t work immediately. Will try to update this post with the results if we do!
The series still isn’t done; stay tuned!