Cable Manager
Cable Manager (CM) closes a specific, common gap: the physical cable and cross-connect records everyone keeps say one thing, and the network’s actual live status says another. CM checks the two against each other continuously, instead of waiting for someone to notice during an outage.
Summary
Network documentation drifts out of date the moment it’s written — an emergency change gets made, nobody updates the record, and six months later nobody remembers what’s actually connected to what. CM fixes this by checking, automatically, rather than hoping someone remembers.
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Nothing to remember to update — CM checks documented cabling against live switch status on its own, continuously.
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Surfaces exactly two things that matter: a connection that’s documented but’s gone dark, and a live connection that was never documented at all.
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Built to the standard a GMP-regulated site requires — every change traceable, nothing informal — and used well beyond where it started because that discipline turned out to matter everywhere.
| A sanitized, fully working demo is available — see it running against real (sanitized) sample data. |
The problem it solves
A cabling company wires a site. IT manages it from there. The moment the installer hands off the rack, the documentation starts going stale — an emergency 2am cross-connect gets made, nobody updates the record, and six months later nobody (including whoever made the change) remembers which port feeds what.
Most documentation tools assume someone will remember to keep them current. CM doesn’t make that assumption — it checks.
What it actually does
Needs Attention dashboard
Reconciles cable records against live SNMP status, two directions at once:
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Documented, but dark — a connection that’s recorded as cross-connected, but hasn’t responded in 30+ days. A candidate for a stale record.
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Active, but undocumented — a port that’s live and passing traffic, with no record of what it’s connected to at all.
Both get surfaced automatically. CM doesn’t fix the record for you — it makes sure you know there’s a record that needs fixing.
Always-current network documentation
A visual tree, a plain-text tree, a connections table, and a device inventory — all regenerated on demand from one real source of truth, not maintained by hand. Correctly handles switch stacks and redundant links, not just the simple cases.
Structured, auditable data entry
Data changes happen through export-edit-reimport, not ad-hoc cell edits. Every change is a deliberate, traceable batch operation — built this way originally for a GMP-regulated site, where an undocumented change isn’t an option.
How it’s built
CM runs on read-only SNMP polling — it never pushes configuration to a switch, only reads status. The stack is a Flask API backed by SQLite, with a cron-driven SNMP poll cycle keeping status current. It’s designed to be low-risk to run against production network gear: nothing it does can change what a switch is doing.
Where this came from
CM was built for a real GMP biotech site, where the standard for documentation is audit-grade: if a connection changed and nobody logged it, that’s a real problem, not a shrug. The same discipline turned out to matter just as much for MSP-style multi-site environments, which is why it’s now used beyond where it started.
Availability
CM isn’t sold as a standalone product with its own price tag. It’s part of 795IT’s Custom Automation access, which works two ways:
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Managed services customers — already covered, part of the relationship.
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Tools only, no full agreement — available on its own, billed alongside infrastructure hosting, no managed-services contract required.
Either way, it’s a conversation, not a checkout page.
Get in touch to talk through what this looks like for your environment.