Layer 2 topology discovery

Posted by pegah s on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by pegah s
Published on 2012-06-22T00:07:43Z Indexed on 2012/06/22 3:18 UTC
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switch

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network-topology

I have been given a network (it is a LAN) comprised of switches and I need to discover the topology of that. (There may be Link Aggregation Groups (LAGs) in the network as well.)

I have done a lot of search on layer 2 topology discovery and I have seen many articles talking about using SNMP MIBs or LLDP (I do not know which one is better or more practical, but all devices in my network support SNMP). But my problem is that I cannot find "the software to install and run" to actually see the topology map. I would really appreciate if someone could send me the website where I can download the code and use it.

I have also found a lot of tools available online such as OpenNMS, Nagios, The Dude, LANsurveyor, SNMPwalk, and many more... But I cannot figure out which one is the best to pick. To summarize: what is the easiest simplest way to discover the layer 2 network topology?

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