Patent ID: 7974218

Claim:
A method comprising: polling a plurality of network devices to determine address entries stored by address tables of the network devices; applying a hash function to the address entries to determine a plurality of key-value associations; maintaining a hash table at a configuration management system separate from the network devices, the hash table comprising the key-value associations, wherein each key of the hash table corresponds to an address entry stored by one or more of the address tables, wherein each value of the hash table identifies which of the address tables are storing the address entry corresponding to the associated key, and wherein at least one of the key-value associations comprises a single key corresponding to an address entry stored by all of the address tables in a plurality of the address tables and a value that identifies the plurality of address tables; and using the hash table to identify all of the network devices that include a particular address entry and all of the address tables of the network devices that include the particular address entry by: identifying a particular key of the hash table comprising the particular address entry, selecting a particular value of the hash table associated with the particular key based on a key-value association between the particular value and the particular key, and wherein the particular value identifies all of the network devices storing the particular address entry and all of the address tables of the network devices storing the particular address entry without requiring a parsing of the contents of each of the address tables of the network devices.