Various implementations disclosed herein include systems, methods and apparatuses that determine connections between non-external facing ports. In some implementations, a method includes identifying one or more port pair connections between non-external network facing ports associated with respective pairs of compliant devices based on associated uplink metadata, wherein the respective pairs of compliant devices are included in a plurality of compliant devices within a network; determining the respective status of each compliant device associated with a particular one of the one or more port pair connections; and adding link data for a particular one of the one or more port pair connections to topology-link map data based at least on the determined respective status of each compliant device associated with the particular one of the one or more port pair connections, wherein the topology-link map data archives accessible information about the topology of the network based at least on the uplink metadata.