Documenting is a part of the day-to-day duties of most systems administrators. We all know that it is kind of boring and pesky task. Still it has to be done to ensure that fellow sysadmins, managers and others would be able to understand what is happening on the network. Network documentation is easy in case of small network with only a couple of computers. But it is quite a lengthy process of the administrator has to deal with large networks with thousands of various components such as desktops, printers, routers etc.

The Dude is a small FREE application that can help sysadmin to monitor and to document networks. The homepage of the Dude offers a small list of features that the utility has.

Personally I ve found it to be quite useful as it can scan the network on its own using a number of protocols such as ICMP, TCP, DNS, SNMP. It would also try to probe for services available on these computers.

The result would be something like this:

Resulting network topologies can be exported as PNG or PDF files.
The best part is that The Dude can be used free of charge!!!:-)

Download link: The Dude 2.0 Beta 7

Technorati : dude, monitoring, network
Del.icio.us : dude, monitoring, network
Ice Rocket : dude, monitoring, network