Historical connection overview and licensing query
2 posts
Good morning,
We are an IT service provider considering whether to use the 'Switch Port Mapper' product to document our clients' switch ports in future and have two questions regarding this.
If the switch is not located in an area with servers, but in an area predominantly used by clients with laptops, can the software automatically generate a complete overview of which clients have connected to the switch over a period of, say, one week? The reason for this is that at any given time, staff may be on holiday, off sick, working from home or, for other reasons, may not have their devices switched on in the office.
Ideally, we would like to see the information on all devices that have been connected to a port in the last X minutes / hours / days / weeks. To achieve this, the software should automatically query / actively monitor the registered switches every X minutes and run as a service or a scheduled task. We would then like to export the collected information to Excel, for example.
And the second question: If we wish to use the product sequentially (not simultaneously) with, say, 20 customers to document the switches, how many licences do we need to purchase?
Many thanks.
On the technical side, Switch Port Mapper takes a snapshot of the switch each time it runs, so there is no built-in "seen in the last X days" report. The way to get one is to collect snapshots on a schedule and build the report from those, which works well and leaves you free to report on anything you like afterwards.
The tool for this is the console version, NSMapCon, which is included with the product and is made for automation. It takes the switch and its credentials on the command line and writes everything it finds to a file with the -output switch, as JSON, XML, CSV, HTML or plain text. Run it from Windows Task Scheduler or cron every X minutes, once per switch, and you get a folder of time-stamped snapshots covering every port and every device behind it.
To save you starting from scratch here is a small Python script that you can use as a template. Its collect command runs the console and saves a time-stamped JSON snapshot, and that is what you schedule. Its report command reads all the snapshots in the folder, optionally limited to the last N days, and writes one CSV, listing each device seen on each port, with its IP address, host name, when it was first and last seen and in how many snapshots. Usage examples are at the top of the file. Please treat it only as a template and adjust it to your needs; it isn't part of the product.
Bear in mind that a switch only reports the MAC addresses currently in its forwarding table, so a laptop that was plugged in for an hour is caught only if a snapshot is taken while it's connected or shortly after. For office laptops every 15 to 30 minutes is usually sufficient.
On the licensing, the licence is counted per device the software is installed on, not per network or per customer you scan. A Business licence explicitly covers providing services to other organisations, so if you work through your 20 customers one after another from a single computer, one single device Business licence is all you need. That is also true if you install it on a machine at one customer's site, leave it collecting for a week, and then remove it before moving on to the next.
You would only need more if it runs on several machines at the same time, for instance scheduled snapshots left running at a few customers in parallel, or several technicians each with their own laptop. In that case it's one licence per machine, and the 5 device pack works out cheaper from four machines up.
The free trial has no time limit and only restricts the output to 10 ports, so you're welcome to try the whole setup against one of your own switches first.