What is manual topology?

In Entuity, manual topology is a facility that augments the automatic discovery of topology. It can be used to add additional links (custom connections) that were not discovered between devices being managed on the same server. Links might not be discovered for the following reasons:

• links are often not discovered around firewalls, because these rarely provide adequate topology information.
• some devices do not provide enough information.
• Entuity does not fully support the device technology.
• you may not want to take the device under full management and instead will manually provide connectivity information.
• links between devices that are not being managed on the same server are not automatically discovered. The manual topology facility can be used to manually create such links on a consolidation server.

In Entuity, you can manually define custom connections between two devices via the Manual Topology page or via the context menu of the two selected objects. The connection between the two devices will be displayed on a Topological Map.

These custom connections are treated as if they were discovered via Auto Discovery, meaning that Entuity creates an association between the source and destination devices using the discovery process, and will subsequently display its status as per the other existing connections on the map. Your custom connections are then listed together on the Manual Topology page for ease of reference and editing.