Hosts or end-systems residing at the edges of a network gather data about the traffic they transmit into and receive from the network. The network's routing protocol (typically a link-state protocol such as OSPF) is monitored and routing data or packets are used to recover the network's current status and topology. This data can be collected, fused, and maintained and a platform, preferably distributed, can be provided to query the data, thus enabling a variety of network management applications.