Techniques are disclosed for re-construction and tracking of a forwarding state of a network device in communication with a network controller in a Software Defined Network (SDN). The techniques include receiving control messages, where the control messages are messages transmitted from a network controller to a network device. The techniques further includes extracting a subset of control messages from the control messages, where each control message from the subset of control messages caused a change in a forwarding state of the network device; generating, based on the extracted subset of control messages, a directed graph, wherein the directed graph is representative of the forwarding state of the network device; and causing the directed graph to be displayed on a display device.