if you’ve ever setup a network and handled IP address allocation, more often than not, you may try to remember the network addressing in your head.

C’mon, how many people out there really document what you do. Techies are well known to not document what we do. Just about very often, we’ll end up forgetting what we have done before. When ever we have to revisit the environment, we’ll need to dig deep into our memory, hoping we can recall our work.

Face it, even I have learnt the lesson of not documenting. Age is catching up and memory is not as good as it used to be. Now, the very least I’ll document the important stuffs.

So, how’s this related to IP address management? I see it simply as documentation of IP address usage. If you do document your IP addresses, I’d guess you’ll probably be using an excel spreadsheet. Heck, a lot of people I know uses excel spreadsheets to track IP address allocations.

Such a document is critical to keep up to date, and you’ll need good team discipline to keep the information current. All you need is just one, yes one, slack in the updates and hell can potentially break loose.

So, here I have stumbled upon a nice tool released by Solarwinds. My network engineer once told me that Solarwind products are very powerful and useful to manage large networks. I never had the chance to experience it, but I’ve played a little with this niftly little free tool they have, the “IP Address Tracker”.

This free version runs standalone, and capable of scanning the given subnet for all IPs which are online at the time. If SNMP is enabled, it will also tryto automatically pick up some details regarding each device. You can also flag each IP manually to categorize them, in addtion you can certainly put down little comments for every address. It will also keep track on the current latency of the IP, the last known date and time it was reacheable.

The user interface is pretty straighforward, and I like it. I use it personally to help me document the few home networks I’m helping to up-keep for my family.

Now, it gets even better, this tool has a paid version which can integrate into the Solarwinds suite of tools. I haven’t seen how it works, but some features I’ve read include running the app as a service, so it can do a realtime tracking of used IP addresses. In addition, it will provide a web interface, meaning a team of network engineers can potentially use it at the same time. That’s my favorite bit, real-time automated documentation and tracking of IP addresses being used.

This tool can certainly save time and effort for network engineers.

With all these said, this tool is only for those networks which allows (I assume) ICMP pings. Otherwise, excel will be your best friend.