Hello,

I'm looking to the community to see how people are drawing their networks, i.e. using symbols to represent complex topology. You can have hardware approach, where every hardware unit are represented. You can also have "entity" approach, where each "service" is shown. Both are interesting but it is difficult to have both on the same schema (but this is needed, especially using virtualization environment). Furthermore, it is difficult to have complex informations on such representation. For instance security parameters (encrypted link, need for authentication) or specific details (protocol type, ports, encapsulation).

So my question is: where your are drawing a representation of your network, what is your approach ? Are you using methodology and/or specific softwares ? What is your recommendations for information to put (or not) ? How to deal with the complexity when the network becomes large and/or you want to put a lot of information on it ?

Examples and links to good references will be appreciated.