I work for a company with a pretty complicated network (hundreds of VLANs, ACLs, firewall rules, switches, etc.). Therefore, whenever there is a new platform/service added, a ticket to the LAN/WAN team has to be created, detailing subnets that have to have access to specified hosts on specified ports - and so on. This is usually documented in a project architecture document in an Excel document.

Whenever the LAN/WAN team responds to the ticket that the connection should be working, I test if that's true, usually via use of a lot of commands like ip route, traceroute -T -p 12345, tcpdump, ping, telnet, curl... basically a lot of manual work to get the necessary info to debug the problem.

I'm basically looking for a few tools: - something to help me maintain network configuration (like custom routing rules via different interfaces) on my hosts - using Ansible here - something to monitor network connectivity and get debug info (e.g. if host A can reach port B on machine C, and if not, get output of stuff like traceroute -T -p, ping) on my hosts in real time - something (like a script or a config to be run) to send to my colleagues that are responsibles for other hosts, so in case the connectivity problem is on their side, I don't have to explain which commands I'd like them to run and give me the output of but instead I get the full output.

I would also like to hear your approaches to maintaining/documenting these types of setups.