>This is not surprising, as I have had Layer 2 and 3 topology turned off on all devices since testing it, because having that spike the CPU on half of my switches every 2 minutes it updates is much more dangerous than it is worth it, and to set the interval to anything less often defeats the purpose of showing "current" link utilization.
Link utilization comes from statistics polling, not topology polling. The topology portion only updates NPM's understanding of topology, not interface utilization. Therefore, if you run topology once then poll for statistics on the interfaces on your maps every 2 minutes, that should take care of it until the topology changes. The default for topology polling is once every half hour, but you could do topology polling once a week or once a day.
>So, what I'm wondering is- is it possible to still get ConnectNow to work, perhaps with some form of LLDP or Avaya's answer to CDP (Synoptics Topology protocol of some kind) and WITHOUT using the layer 2 and 3 topology discovery stuff built in?
Not at the moment.
>Does anyone know if from Orion's perspective, layer 2 topology is exactly LLDP or if it's some mixture of that and arp/mac tables?
It's a mixture of a number of things, including all that you specified and more.
>Oh, and I suppose it's worth mentioning- I don't know what switch connects to what for 70+% of our network because we have 12 major sites and about 60 off-site locations that are just too many to figure out. Heck the guys that installed them probably aren't positive anymore.
This is exactly the situation NTM is designed to fix. You don't know your network topology but (hopefully) have IPs and credentials. You don't have time to go map all the sites manually, even if it would be helpful to have them. NTM's goal is to be able to take your IPs and credentials and do all the tedious discovery for you, then let you quickly fiddle around with map parameters to get all the maps you want in a short amount of time. Is that not working for you?