Best practices for router interface description format

Implementing company-wide standards for interface description strings in routers or switches should be a top priority for all network engineers.

Well defined and structured description strings helps with automation for the most tedious and boring manual steps associated with deployment, configuration,

monitoring and decommission of any network connections. Network interface descriptions should include some of the following information elements encoded with special characters

that allow easy parsing by scripts, network management tools and makes easy for human eye to spot any problems during troubleshooting sessions.

Here is the sample naming format and structure that we normally recommend  and that is easily integrated with Nectus NMS parsing scripts.

  1. Link Type.  Example of 3 characters link type encoding  can be: BBN – Backbone, TRL – Internet Transit,  OOB- Out of Band, UPL – Uplink, DCI – DC Interconnect…
  2. Connected Device name. Name of the remote device connected to this link.
  3. Status. T – Testing, D – Decommed, P – In Production
  4. Telco provider’s name : LVL3 , ATT, VRZ, ABN, TELIA, XO.. etc
  5. Telco Circuit ID
  6. Phone number to call in case of the outage.

Usage example:

interface TenGigabitEthernet 1/5

description DCI#P#ATT#T4/HCGS/831899/SC#1-800-456-5672

 

/by