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Best Network Documentation Tool
netViz vs. Visio
a Comparative Review
Know Your Network
We discovered Concord’s netViz network design and documentation tool handily
beats Visio in every category of testing.
by Barry Nance, Network Testing Labs
You can do anything you want with a well-designed, well-documented network. With
relative ease, you can expand it, enhance it and troubleshoot it. You can plan its future
and even reduce its costs. In contrast, the only thing you can easily do with a poorly-
designed, poorly-documented network is spend money on it.
We asked ourselves, “Is there a practical, worthwhile tool that can truly help a medium-
to large-scale company design and document its network?” To answer this question, we
decided to pit a lesser-known but well-spoken-of Concord Communications tool, netViz,
against Microsoft’s popular Visio diagramming product in a series of stringent tests.
Concord acquired the netViz company mid-way through 2003.
The ideal, perfect network design and documentation tool has a highly visual, intuitive
and responsive user interface. It comes with every conceivable symbol you might
possibly need to depict the devices and connections in your network. Every make and
model of networking product must be represented in the symbol set. Instead of being a
mere drawing element, each symbol must be an intelligent object containing embedded
information that describes how the device or link behaves and how it connects to other
devices. The perfect network design and documentation tool imports knowledge about
the network from virtually any documentation source in which you’ve stored some
information about your network. You can use the tool to zoom in or out at will to see the
entire network or some small part of the network. Finally, the perfect network design and
documentation tool integrates with a network monitoring product to graphically pinpoint
devices and connections that are experiencing problems.
We put netViz 6.5 and Visio Professional 2003 through their paces to see which product
more closely matched our ideal tool. We concluded that netViz is light years ahead of
Visio in every category. While Visio is a general-purpose diagramming tool suitable for

employee organizational charts, office furniture floorspace analysis and simple database
decomposition, Visio fell far short of our network design and documentation tool
requirements.
Perhaps the best way to give you an overall perspective on the differences between the
two tools is this: We found that netViz is to Visio as Visio is to Microsoft Paint.
netViz earned high marks for its strong focus on the specific task of network design, its
intuitive and responsive interface and its ability to import network information and
specifications from nearly any source. Moreover, netViz’s comprehensive and
voluminous symbol set covers virtually every networking product and networking
situation you could possibly imagine.
netViz wins Network Testing Labs’ World Class award for best network design and
documentation tool. In fact, we found netViz to be so compellingly and indispensably
useful that we decided to make it a permanent part of Network Testing Labs’ computing
environment. We’ll use netViz, for instance, to document each of the testbeds for all the
evaluations we perform.
Designing and Documenting a Network
netViz is a network designer’s dream - it understands large networks and complex
networking. In contrast, Visio is a general-purpose, multi-discipline, one-dimensional
diagramming and drawing tool. Clicking on a diagrammed node in Visio merely lets you
change the node’s label text, and Visio’s pop-up menus focus mostly on drawing
functions - viewing, formatting and editing actions.
With netViz, every diagrammatic symbol is intelligent. When we created a link, netViz
appropriately asked us to enter link-related information - cable type, link speed and other
relevant data. Similarly, when we added a router to our design, netViz appropriately
asked us for router-related information - the router’s manufacturer, model, number of
slots, revision number and other router-specific data. If that weren’t enough, we
discovered that the next netViz version will have a spreadsheet-like ability to embed
formulas and behaviors inside an instance of the symbol. The next version will also be
much more data-driven. For example, for the entire network or just a named group of
subnets, you’ll be able to globally change from one router manufacturer to another in a

single operation and see the result ripple across your entire design.
To its credit, Visio’s property sheets for node objects do let you enter asset inventory and
other node details, but Visio focuses primarily on drawing your network, not representing
it. In particular, Visio’s Custom Properties Sheet can record information about each
network element on the diagram, but the custom properties vary little from one type of
device to another. Another network-specific aspect of the latest version of Visio is its
Rack Diagram. Once you select a rack or cabinet shape and size, the rack components
you select snap into place in the rack or cabinet. Visio is also intelligent with respect to
Microsoft Active Directory structures and has three directory services templates that can
be helpful when you’re designing Active Directory objects.
netViz takes a sophisticated, multidimensional approach to categorizing and rendering
your network. Using its easy-to-navigate hierarchical structure, we used netViz in our
tests to design and display the many layers and levels of an entire global network,
consisting of regional subnetworks, local subnets within regions, local networks, devices,
servers, routers - every logical and physical part of the overall network.
We found we could easily describe and instantiate a variety of test networks with netViz,
from the simplest to the most intricate. Starting at the level of the entire enterprise, we
quickly and painlessly established network centers in several countries, then created a
second layer beneath the first to provide information on the numbers and kinds of
networking equipment at those network centers. Delving yet another layer deeper, we
then entered just the kinds of detail we wanted to show for each of the devices at each of
the network centers. Visio lacks netViz’s hierarchical approach to viewing a network as a
complex, layered structure. Dealing with any but the smallest of networks through
Visio’s simplistic diagrammatic display requires several orders of magnitude more effort
than through netViz.
Out of the box, netViz let us track just about every aspect of a device or link we wished,
including manufacturer, model, version, revision date, location and other pertinent data.
Moreover, because every network and every company is different, netViz provides a
well-integrated, easy-to-access customization feature that makes tailoring netViz to your
specific network a snap. Rather flexibly, we quickly set up our own data fields in netViz

to characterize the network exactly the way we wanted. For example, it took us less than
a minute to tell netViz to track Virtual Private Network (VPN) and firewall configuration
data for each of our routers. In contrast, Visio has only a limited ability to customize and
specify the data items you want to track for each node or link in a network.
When you tell netViz to obtain network specifications from a database repository in your
company, it doesn’t just import the data on a one-time basis. It instead creates an ongoing
link to the database and thus stays constantly current and up-to-date.
With only a little more effort, we were also able to use netViz’s database connectivity
feature to link its display of devices and connections to a relational database of device
status information maintained by a separate network monitoring product. We thus caused
netViz to highlight network problems and outages by coloring the device red (or make it
blink) when the network monitoring tool detected the problem.
While Visio can export its diagram data to a database or other ODBC-accessible data
repository, netViz, we found to our delight, can import or export data from or to nearly
anywhere. If you have network documentation embedded in a spreadsheet, text file or
database, netViz can import the data and use it to know more about your network. When
you decide to use netViz to design and document your network, you don’t have to enter
all the data about the network from scratch - a huge plus for both netViz and you.
One of our favorite netViz features - and one that sets it far apart from Visio - is the
flexible way we could define the double-click behavior of any diagrammed object or
object type. We could instruct netViz to drill down to the next layer, link to another
diagram, run a basic script, run an external program, open a documentation file, open a
URL or run a command field. We used this option to, among other things, cause netViz
to ping a specific device when we double-clicked its icon. Visio’s ability to run Visual
Basic Script (VBS) macros can help manipulate diagrams and diagrammatic elements,
but Visio simply doesn’t offer the kind of sophisticated flexibility that netViz does. The
only options Visio presents for modifying double-click behavior include editing the
shape’s text label, opening a drawing group in a new window, opening a shape’s
ShapeSheet, displaying help, switching to a different drawing page or running a VBS
macro.

Usability
The netViz user interface is intuitive and responsive. It organizes its many device and
connection symbols in catalogs, rather than toolbars, to help save its user’s time and
effort. A compressible-expandable tree view window displays a network’s hierarchical
structure and aids in organizing your design and documentation endeavors. In addition to
its diagrammatic display of the network, netViz can also depict a network purely as a set
of connections or in a data-intensive table view of node and connection characteristics.
Visio’s design environment displays multiple diagrams in Microsoft Multiple Document
Interface (MDI) windows. Although it clearly distinguishes between different kinds of
network nodes (it has separate toolbar icons, for example, for Juniper and Cisco routers),
the distinction is primarily a visual one.
Both netViz and Visio integrate well with Microsoft Office components, such as
Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. Both can also publish results as Web pages, and netViz
and Visio offer collaboration modes in which multiple users can concurrently design and
document a network. Visio treats the collaborative effort as a business meeting or
brainstorming session, while netViz allows you to publish a project and delegate to others
the tasks of reviewing, annotating and extending the netViz data.
Concord ships over 23,000 distinct device and connection symbols with netViz - far more
than Visio - and netViz can use Visio symbols, if you have both products. netViz can also
import and export network documents from and to Visio.
Visio required that we undergo Microsoft’s new over-the-Internet product activation
process. netViz installation is simpler, requiring only that you insert the CD-ROM disks
and specify the directory in which you want netViz installed.
Visio comes with printed manuals, but they don’t cover the network design details of the
tool. They only explain how to use Visio’s diagramming and drawing operations. In
contrast, the netViz printed manuals and online help provide exactly the guidance you’ll
need to document a network. The netViz documentation focuses clearly and
comprehensively on networking as well as the best ways to use netViz to document a
network.