By David Mellon

For a suite of tools to be as effective as possible, how routers and interfaces are named is critical.

A company I previously worked at implemented a naming convention worldwide as part of their NetQoS implementation. We made sure that the names were structured in this format: “Region-Sector-Country-Location-Other-Instance.”

For the region, we used AM (Americas), AP (Asia-Pacific) or EMAI (Europe, Middle East, Africa, India).  Sector was which part of the business sector the equipment serviced.  For example, we had a “bath and kitchen” sector at the company I worked for, so that became “BK.”  Commercial systems were “CS,” residential systems were “RS” and Vehicle Control systems were “VCS,” for example.

We used the two character country code for each country that you’d find in the ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 standard, and we used airport codes for a three-letter city location. 

In the “Other” section, we added necessary additional information such as model number, floor, street address, circuit id, equipment type (RTR for routers, AP for access point, SW for switch), etc.  We expanded this section with dashes to add more information as needed. For example, we always used the vendor circuit ID in the name.

Finally, we numbered the devices sequentially in the “Instance” section.  We made it a company standard that the first device in any location was designated number “1” and we went up from there.

Here’s some examples:

• Router EMAI-BK-UK-HUL-3745-wa453596

Just from looking at the name, we know that this device is from a site in EMAI, part of the Bath and Kitchen sector, located in the city of Hull, U.K., and that it is router type 3745, and the vendor link ID is “wa453596” 

• Sub-Interface EMAI-BK-UK-HUL-MFG-MPLS-E1-wa453596

This is a site in EMAI, Bath and Kitchen sector, in Hull, U.K. again.  But we also know that it is on a manufacturing site, it’s an MPLS link, and it’s got an E1 speed.  

It may seem a little bit complicated – but when we were looking for network performance data, it was invaluable.  We were able to easily filter by region, sector, country, site type, and other criteria for granting views, reporting, capacity planning, and other activity.  It greatly simplified our work process. Without this level of standardization, I would not have been able to get the most out of the tools we had.

Of course, this is just the naming convention we used – what is your naming convention and how does it facilitate the use of your networking tools?

David Mellon is a Senior Account Manager at NetQoS

If you liked this article, please feel free to "re-tweet" it on Twitter:
What’s in a Naming Convention? http://bit.ly/LuyX