Hi,
Switchmap (http://sourceforge.net/projects/switchmap) is a most excellent little utility written in perl. It goes out to all your configured switches utilizing SNMP and pulls all the ARP and MAC tables from them, and builds static HTML pages for each switch with tables that list port number, speed, duplex, CDP neighbor information, MAC address(es), IP address(es), and the fqdn(s) of the device(s) seen on the ports at the time of polling. It also provides a rudimentary search function that lets you search through all the hosts to find which switch port across all your switches a particular host was last seen on. This is very handy when you have a large number of switches and ports and you need to go "hunting".
Now I may be having a UTS moment here, and if I am please correct me, but while Observium seems to have something similar, it doesn't appear to go to the depth that Switchmap does to actually tell you what host(s) are actually connected to what switch ports by utilizing the switches ARP and MAC tables.
What would make Observium - and Switchmap - even better would be if there was integration between the two, similar to the SmokePing or RANCID integration. Switchmap stores all its polled data for each switch in separate CSV files, there doesn't seem to be anything mysterious going on as far as data storage is concerned. What would it take to make a "Switchmap" tab in Observium under a device that lists this data, similar to the way RANCID has a "config" tab and SmokePing has a "Ping" tab that is integrated into Observium?
Regards,
Michael