As an organization's IT infrastructure scales, new devices are constantly added to meet growing network requirements. This raises the need to manage hundreds of IP addresses across multiple subnets to ensure that every newly added device is configured with a unique IP to connect with the network. To simplify this process, network admins rely on the concept of network supernets — also known as route summarization or route aggregation.
Supernets enable you to summarize multiple subnets (smaller networks) based on the host portion of the selected subnets. These associated subnets are then addressed as a single unit from outside the supernet or network. Networks that span across several subnets are often grouped within a supernet. This makes it important to coherently monitor IP addresses and subnets along with their associated supernets.
IP subnets and supernets are applied in tandem to improve IP address utilization and network segmentation. While subnets help you reduce address depletion by segmenting your network into smaller units, supernets help you simplify and speed up the routing process by aggregating these units. Supernetting offers the following benefits:
Efficient routing: Several routing entries can be grouped as a single entry to reduce the routing lookup time and increase the routing speed. Route summarization also reduces the load on network routers.
Network traffic: A reduced routing table and simplified lookup can help you control and reduce network traffic.
Easier management: Supernets offer you the flexibility to aggregate several subnets with a CIDR prefix. This gives you a simplified view of your network, enabling effective IP address management.
Building supernets is a best practice to reduce network traffic, increase routing lookups, and optimize your network address space usage. However, since supernets contain your network subnets, mismanaged or unmonitored supernets can easily cause issues in your network that can affect all the associated subnets.
It is important that you deploy a full fledged IP address management solution that can help you add supernets, associate subnets, and drill down the status of individual IP addresses with ease.
OpUtils' supernet monitoring simplifies the process of IP address management across multiple subnets. With the IP Address Manager module, network admins can simplify monitoring and management of the network address space by enabling a central view of different supernets and their associated subnets.
Adding supernets to your IP address management solution shouldn't be a hassle. With a simple three-step process, OpUtils enables you to add supernets to be monitored to your IP Address Manager console. After adding a supernet, you can associate the required subnets to it.
Once a supernet is created, newly added subnets that are in the range of that supernet are automatically associated to the supernet. The added supernets and their associated subnets can then be monitored with the IP Address Manager module.
OpUtils' IP Address Manager module offers a hierarchical tree view that displays the monitored supernets and their associated subnets. You can view in-depth insights into the associated subnets by clicking on the subnet in the tree view. You can also further drill down to the details of a specific IP address. This gives you a holistic view of how your IP address space is structured and simplifies the monitoring process.
OpUtils gives you a complete overview of all the subnets associated to your supernets and enables various capabilities such as:
Real-time statuses: View the real-time status of the associated subnets, their utilization, the IP availability metrics, and the scan status.
IP-specific reports for planned network scaling: OpUtils' set of granular IP-specific reports helps you understand the IP address space utilization in your network. This enables you to enhance capacity planning and optimize address space utilization by scaling your networks accordingly to include contiguous subnets that can be formed into supernets.
Instant alerts to avert network issues: Instant threshold-based alerts can escalate emerging network issues such as subnet overutilization, under utilization, or IP address conflicts in your network. This helps you efficiently troubleshoot network issues and ensure constant IP address space availability.
Along with easily creating and monitoring your supernets, OpUtils offers you several advanced capabilities for effective IP address space management. It is a complete IP address and switch port management solution that enables hassle-free network monitoring with more than 30 built-in networking tools.
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