Inventory
The Inventory Application provides different views of the entire network infrastructure components.
The views are provided in dedicated tabs that fall in one of the following categories:
The content in each tab is displayed in a tabular format which can be easily sorted and filtered.
Inventory+ (NQE)
Inventory+, powered by NQE, provides easy access to network data views in different technology areas, like basic and hardware device info, L2, and L3.
For more information, visit the Inventory+ (NQE) page.
Network Devices Inventory
The network devices inventory consists of all on-premises network devices, including any logical partitions they may have. The information in the table covers the device Name, its Tags if any, the Vendor, the Model, the OS version, the Management IP(s), and the device collection Status.
The Management IP is the IP address of the device management interface if one exists, or the IP address used for collecting from the device. This field is a list because some platforms allow to configure multiple management IPs.
In addition, from the inventory the user can jump to the device configuration and download its collection logs if needed for troubleshooting.
Device Tagging
Users can add metadata to devices in the form of tags. The idea of adding metadata to devices comes up in a variety of contexts:
- To generally better manage the inventory of devices collected and modeled by Forward.
- To enable greater filtering flexibility across the platform.
- To enable Forward to be used as a dynamic inventory provider in automation pipelines.
The user can associate one or more tags to a device from the Network Device Inventory page, the device card, and the device popup when the device is selected in the topology. However, only the last applied tag is displayed in the topology.
To tag a device from the Network Device Inventory page, select the devices of interest and click the Edit tags button at the top of the page. A drawer opens to the right of the page where the user can perform actions on the device tags. The supported actions are Add, Remove and Remove all tags. Once a tag is assigned to at least one device, the Tags column appears in the Network Device Inventory page, allowing users to sort and filter by tags.
Tags can be colored by selecting a color from a predefined list, or using a color defined using an RGB, YSL or #HEX format.
Tags are also used for device coloring, to learn more read Device Coloring paragraph in the On-Premises Infra topology page.
Cloud Inventory
The Cloud objects tab shows in a tabular format all the cloud infrastructure entities Forward is modeling. As for any
other table in the system, the user can filter and sort each column to get to the information s/he cares about.
Network Endpoints Inventory
Endpoints allow users to import text data of various formatting via SNMP, CLI, and HTTP GET requests. Forward Enterprise parses the imported data, tries to infer its structure and publishes it in the NQE data model as well as in the Inventory. The data is refreshed every time a new network Snapshot is taken. Learn more about Endpoints.
