What you might be missing is that flooding a network with ICMP messages is exactly what a 'denial of service' attack does. Even a reasonably good network support team (assumes that network security is a part of networking, although it might not be) would be monitoring for it. The caution is to not be insensitive to the impact of excessive queries and be perceived as one of the bad guys.
Yes, I am aware of a DOS attack.
While I'm not responsible for "networking". I'm the only one that can pinpoint broadcast storms and spot our techs ghosting on the network in multicast mode. Previously, before I came to this job they went room to room checking every port. Wireshark that crap and you can find the PC/Phone in loopback and with a proper naming convention on the PC or phone, find the room in seconds. Don't get me started on that either
I work in a part of the public sector which isn't funded very well. Our top IT guys make 32-49k a year. I'm on the higher end but its dreadfully obvious that the staff is overwhelmed and unskilled. Many of the guys are literally the public sectors failures and some of us are burdened with all the work.
The only person I have to worry about "alarming" is myself. I assume if you are looking for such a visio map, you may be as well.
I will definitely add a "maximum interval" setting as for most people they need to see if a site is down. I personally am looking at more than just if the site is down (and out). I want to see every "Blip" in the network in a large quantity so that when I take the data to our vendor that supplies the equipment for the radios and towers I can show them out of 1,000,000 requests; 87,000 weren't returned at all and 160,000 weren't returned in under 5000ms.
If you run the macro on your network for a brief period of time (granted you are the network admin) with your node values, do you see christmas lights? I do. We drop alot of packets. Its pathetic.
Last year, I went from site to site performing tests with wireshark and analyzing the data and found the technicians run amok at the sites. They multicast video because unicast is too difficult to set up. They constantly have switches in loops throwing arp requests. Its painful.
So, yeah, I probably should clarify that I'm also getting heat from our IT director telling me to "Make shit work" so our users at the very end of our star topology can access resources at the main office without getting disconnects and latency and I'm telling him that he needs a dedicated network admin and he can't toss the responsibility on various people in office and its going to be a cohesive strong solution.
Here I am... Implementing a data warehouse, managing 14 applicationsk, and the ETL processes that keep it all running, writing reports and metrics, doing RFP's, documenting this shit and still have to hand hold the few people I have on day to day (follow the fucking calendar I made you) processes that keep this place from burning to the ground.
Al, give me a break if you don't agree with my methods
Hehe
