Embedded approach for device inventory collection utilizing OS programmability

A major task of managing a computer network is to gather the inventory of the devices, including hardware, software, and the configuration. It is desirable to collect this information efficiently. Traditional Network Management tools require an appliance that resides on the network to collect device information. This paper introduces a distributed, embedded approach to collect network device information without an extra appliance. Utilizing device programmability with add on scripts, the network devices can communicate with each other and perform the inventory collection tasks. The collected inventory information can be sent to network management stations or hosted inventory reporting applications. This mechanism is used on Cisco devices without any device OS upgrade by using a set of scripts to collect CLI and SNMP information from the devices. Utilizing the computing power on multiple networking devices, this distributed mechanism can concurrently collect the whole network inventory efficiently. This paper gives the overview of the approach, then drills into the architecture, mechanism of the scripts, the coding standards, performance, impact to the devices, scalability, benefits, and discusses future work.