Method and apparatus for determining unmanaged network devices in the topology of a network

摘要

A network management apparatus and method for determining the topology of a network 1 is described. The present invention uses data relating to discovered devices on the network 1, typically network management address table data, to build a network tree. Due to the presence of unsupported or unmanaged connecting network devices, some branches of the resulting tree may not be resolved. In order to address this, for each unresolved branch of the network tree, the present invention attempts to determine the type of each of the discovered network devices on the branch, and if the type of every discovered network device on the branch is determined to be an endstation type, the present invention determines that an undiscovered connecting device is present on the branch.