NetLay: Remembering what happened, and asking the network how it got there
Ping history without a time-series database, alerts that tell you once instead of nagging, and a traceroute matched against the devices already on the map.
Category
App Dev
Building software: architecture, tooling and hard-won lessons.
NetLay: Diagrams on demand and tracing a path
Three exportable pictures generated from one data model, no diagramming library involved, and a troubleshooting tool that fell out of the port bookkeeping almost for free.
NetLay: Pulses, passwords and slow cables
A travelling dot on every cable, accounts and view-only sharing, and showing that a device is slow rather than down without drawing a single graph.
NetLay: Fibre, quiet devices, building plans and a folder you can carry
Cable types on uplinks, devices that are allowed to stay silent, several building plans on one map, and packing the whole application into a folder I can take to work.
NetLay: Virtual machines, VLAN colours and selecting more than one thing
Virtual machines have no port of their own, VLANs belong to the switch port rather than the device, and the map finally lets you pick up more than one thing at a time.
NetLay: A device catalog, hubs on the desk, and what a device really is
A make and model library, network devices that refuse to live in a cabinet, the fields an inventory actually needs, and a blank page caused by one line of state code.
NetLay: Getting Cisco port names right
Switches that talk to each other, port modules, stack cables, and why the second switch in a stack is not called what I assumed it was called.
NetLay: Cabinets, switches and a map that pings itself
The first working NetLay build, a map you can drag things around on, a data model that refuses to double book a port, and a pinger that had to be taught Windows lies.
Introducing NetLay, a living map of your network
NetLay is a map of the building with every cabinet, switch, port and device on it, and a live dot beside each one telling you whether it is answering.