If your data center experienced an outage due to an ISP problem, the first thing you probably do is go to a terminal and execute your nifty command line tools. These tools give you a lot of information, textually. However, troubleshooting network outages aren't always easy, as slow connections or outages may be caused by issues outside your corporate network and parsing all this data is hard.

The ability to visualize your IT infrastructure from end to end is critical in fostering successful operations and delivery of service. Being a network admin, you need to keep a close eye on all your network devices, whether they're across the globe or inside your data centers. However, this is difficult to do without an actual location-based topology map of your network infrastructure.