Patent ID: 8867406

Claim:
A customer-edge-discovery subsystem comprising: one or more computers within a VPN-provider system interconnected with a public communications network; and instructions, stored in an electronic memory, which encode the customer-edge-discovery subsystem that automatically generates a data representation of a VPN-provider view of the network, stored in one or more of a database, memory, mass-storage device, and other computer-readable data-storage medium by: initializing the data representation; accessing tools and protocols available within the VPN-provider system to discover elements, connections, interfaces, VPNs, and other components and characteristics of the public communications network and include representations of the discovered elements, connections, interfaces, VPNs, and other components and characteristics of the public communications network in the data representation; and finding customer-edge devices (“CEs”) for each provider-edge device (“PE”) using broadcast domains or address-resolution-protocol (“ARP”) caches and including representations of the discovered CEs in the data representation of the VPN-provider view of the network; wherein finding CEs for each PE using broadcast domains or ARP caches further comprises: accessing the PE to obtain virtual routing and forwarding (“VRF”) tables maintained by the PE for each PE in the VPN-provider view of the network; extracting from the VRF all network addresses within a subnet represented by the VRF for each VRF table, filtering duplicate network addresses from the extracted network addresses; and using the extracted addresses to find the CEs for the PE.