ZipTie 2007.12 Datasheet


ZipTie is an open source, easy-to-use, network inventory, configuration, and change management
solution.

Inventory Discovery
ZipTie has a sophisticated inventory discovery mechanism to discover devices in a network. It
uses a combination of ICMP, TCP, and SNMP scans to identify devices and crawls the network
using ARP, CDP, interface IP addresses, and routing neighbor data. ZipTie also backs up the
configuration(s) of devices and has a comprehensive network device model for modelling all the
device data that is backed up. As part of the backup process, detailed asset information like
model numbers, serial numbers, card and daughter card informaton are also collected and modeled.
The model also contains information about interfaces, filter lists, SNMP, and VLANs.

Configuration History
ZipTie uses the Subversion version control system to store a configuration's history for as long as
the user wants. By using Subversion, ZipTie improves performance by storing an entire copy of the
most current version, and then stores reverse differences for older versions. Subversion also
enables ZipTie to provide support for binary deltas and configuration metadata.

Configuration Comparisons
With ZipTie, an user can compare two different snapshots of a configurations, or two different
configurations of the same device, or configurations of two different devices. For example,
an user can compare the running-config and startup-config of a device to find out what is
different between the two configs.

Tools Plugin Framework
The ZipTie Tools Plugin Framework allows network administrators and tool developers to integrate
their existing tool sets into ZipTie and leverage the rich user interface and scalability of ZipTie.
The Tools Plugin Framework also allows users to drop in new tools and automation scripts easily
and provides a set of commonly used tools (Ping, Traceroute, DNS Lookup, Interface Brief, etc.)
out of the box.

Change Automation
Want to quickly add or delete a community string, SNMP trap host, or syslog server ?
ZipTie enables very simple to quite sophisticated change automation via its Tools Plugin
Framework. Network administrators can roll out changes to a large number of devices
transparently as ZipTie provides the end user with detailed data of all the communication
between ZipTie and the device(s).

Multi Vendor Support
ZipTie provides out of the box support for many vendors and models. Users can either create
their own adapters using the Ziptie Adapter Development Environment (ZDE) for devices that
ZipTie does not support yet or leverage community contributed adapters.

The complete list of supported devices (out of the box) by ZipTie are :

  • Cisco - IOS, CatIOS, MSFC, CatOS, ArrowPoint, Security Appliance (PIX, ASA, and FWSM), Linksys
  • Juniper - JUNOS
  • Nortel - BayRS, BayStacks
  • Vyatta - OFR
  • Extreme - Summit, Alpine
  • F5 - BigIP, 3DNS
  • Foundry - FastIron
  • Nokia - CheckPoint

Fully Featured Scheduler
In ZipTie backups can be executed impromptu or scheduled using ZipTie's cron based scheduler.
ZipTie's scheduler provides the users with fine grained tuning of a backup schedule. For example,
an user can setup a schedule to backup devices every weekday at 2:30 AM but if that falls during
a maintenance window (say, the 1st and 15th of every month), then ZipTie will not try to backup
those devices during the maintenance window.

Tagging and Searching
ZipTie supports the concept of "tagging" network devices. Users can associate as many tags as they
want with multiple devices and can also search for devices with specific tags (e.g. all "core" "routers"
in "north_america" that are located in the "dallas_data_center"). ZipTie also provides a powerful
search engine (powered by Lucene) for searching text configurations. Users can leverage this search
engine to find important data or anomalies and implement best practices. For example, if no config
should contain "public" as a community string, then using a search like (name:"/running-config" OR
name:"/startup-config") AND text:"community public" will return the list of offending configs.