What Is A Network Source of Truth?

An authoritative, structured, record of what your network is supposed to be.

A network source of truth is the authoritative, structured record of what your network is supposed to be: every device, IP, VLAN, subnet, rack position, circuit, and how they connect. It’s documentation that’s queryable, not a wiki page or a spreadsheet that went stale three months ago. Monitoring tells you something is down; a source of truth tells you what that thing is, where it lives, what depends on it, and what it was meant to be doing.