Tracking all your networks and subnets



Now we've started building a lot more in Azure it's quickly become apparent that you need to plan the networking properly and have some tooling to help you with this.

I'm sure networking people already know about the tools etc that are on the market to help with this but we've come from a position of knowing very little and having to fill the knowledge gap.

I thought we'd share 2 tools that we have found very useful that help us with this - the first is this

http://lightmesh.com/subnet-builder/

This allows you to take a network and split it up into subnets - we found this really helped with visualising what we were doing and helped with the planning - the online tool is free to use - here is a screenshot from that to give you an idea - it's a lot nicer than most other subnet calculators I've seen.



And secondly is this one - which we have installed and use to track what subnets we have allocated and help with out IPAM (ip address management) .

https://phpipam.net/

This allows us to track all the subnets we create and what they are used for - it can do a lot of other stuff too - but we are just using the basics for now - we found just trying to do it in Azure was quite difficult to do but this tool we quite like.

Again here is a quick pic to give you a flavour



There are loads of other tools out there and I'm not really an expert in this stuff but i certainly found them useful - in fact the first tool is useful even if you are not involved in any of the planning just to understand how subnets work a little better.

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