“The automated network operations in today’s cloud networks are dependent on both a highly programmable software infrastructure as well as deeper visibility into what the network is doing. Legacy approaches to visibility fall short of these cloud requirements,” said Ken Duda, and CTO and Senior Vice President, Software Engineering for Arista Networks. “The Arista state-streaming approach provides an open framework with unprecedented levels of completeness and granularity for network state information. Our CloudVision platform harnesses streamed network state to provide customers of all types with clearer real-time and historical visibility into their network.”
A State-based Streaming Approach to Telemetry
Arista EOS is a state-based software architecture built on a foundation called NetDB™ (Network Database). With NetDB, Arista EOS devices store all real-time state in one common database and then aggregate that state from all devices into a network-wide view. By collecting every state change on the network, Arista customers will have access to both real-time and historic views of the network in one place and at a level of granularity never before achievable. To leverage this rich network data, the CloudVision platform’s analytics engine provides telemetry visualization for this network-wide state. This approach includes the following capabilities and benefits:
- Instantaneous event-driven streaming of every state change, providing a dramatic improvement in granularity compared to traditional polling models.
- Complete state visibility from all devices in the network, including configuration, counters, errors, statistics, tables, environmentals, buffer utilization, flow data, and much more.
- CloudVision Analytics Engine for storing state history and performing trend analysis, event correlation, and automated alerts. The basis for both real-time monitoring and historical forensic event investigation.
- New Telemetry Apps for the CloudVision Portal, including the Workstream Analytics Viewer, providing simplified visualization of network-wide state for faster time to resolution.
- An open framework, built on standard RESTful APIs as well as OpenConfig-based infrastructure, providing a point for integration into a variety of partner solutions and customer-specific infrastructure.
- Expansion of existing EOS Telemetry Tracer capabilities across device, topology, virtual machine, container, and application components.
Expanded Ecosystem Partners
Arista’s partner ecosystem can leverage many benefits of this new telemetry solution. With real-time state streaming, Arista partner solutions receive more granular data compared to the traditional polling mechanisms. This provides deeper integration and ultimately, more visibility into the network for the partner’s solution.
With access to the network-wide state through common API’s at multiple integration points, Arista’s partners can access the network state either streamed directly from the devices or from the central state repository within CloudVision.
