User's Manual

168 CHAPTER 5: WORKING WITH THE MAP
discovery. For more information see “There are clouds in my map” on
page 141
.
■ They may be used to separate a link into two halves. This can be
useful in situations where you would like to monitor both halves of
the link separately. Clouds are used to automatically separate WAN
links into two halves, so you can choose to monitor one half of the
link, but not the other. For more information see “
Monitoring the
Network” on pagepage 273 and “Using 3Com Network Director On
A Multi-Site Network” on page page 681.
■ They may be used to represent logical entities in your network for
which no existing icon is appropriate, or to represent sections of the
network that are not under your administrative control. For example,
you may use a cloud to represent the network that is administered by
an ISP.
For more information about adding clouds to the map see “
Adding Items
to the Map” on page 202.
The label in the center of the cloud indicates the family type of the links
that are connected to the cloud. The family type of a link to the cloud is
based upon the type of the interface that the other end of the link is
connected to. For example, Gigabit Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and 10 Mbps
Ethernet interfaces all belong to the Ethernet family.
It is not necessary for all of the links connected to a cloud to belong to
the same family. If they do not then the label in the center of the cloud
will be one of three special values as shown in the table below.
Table 20 Special Cloud Values
Clouds and Submaps
When you choose to view the devices in your network grouped by
subnet, a single cloud can appear in several different submaps and may
also appear in the top-level map. The decision as to whether or not a
Label Description
Unknown The cloud has no links attached.
WAN The links attached to the cloud belong to two or more families. All of the
families are families that are commonly used for WAN communications.
Mixed The links attached to the cloud belong to two or more families. None, or
not all, of the families are commonly used for WAN communications.