Sean Carolan wrote:
I'll repeat my recommendation for OpenNMS. Getting started is as easy as 'yum install' (almost...). And it can do about anything you'd want in a monitoring system - including matching up those switch ports with the connected devices.
Les, at first I didn't heed your advice because I figured it would be another ten hour battle to get opennms installed. I was pleasantly surprised to find that that it installed in ten minutes using yum on my CentOS 5 box. Much slicker interface than netdisco, and it discovered all the ports on my switches on the first try. Thanks for the suggestion!
It was somewhat difficult to install on Centos (mostly just getting a Sun JVM installed sanely) until they added the yum repository. It is still somewhat complicated to deal with all of the things it can do so I'd suggest joining the mailing list if you haven't already. It does support many more devices out of the box than netdisco, including hosts as well as network equipment. If you want it to collect snmp data for graphs on the switch ports that don't have addresses you can set collection manually for each one or just change snmpStorageFlag to "all' in datacollection-config.xml.