Arista Networks that builds and sells Ethernet switches for cloud-computing data centers has launched telemetry and analytics capabilities specifically designed for modern cloud networks. The newly introduced Arista Extensible OS (EOS) and CloudVision offer its customers with an understanding of their everyday workloads, workflows and workstreams. It also channelizes the process in the completion of the daily tasks and keeps a check to minimize the operational costs. It enables customers to move to cloud-class automation without needing significant custom internal development.
CloudVision is built on one of Arista’s EOS innovative state database model, called “SysDB”. SysDB acts as a broker between the many processes that make up EOS, enabling the scale, feature velocity EOS is known. SysDB holds the entire state for that switch e.g., configuration, topology, protocol state, monitoring counters details, etc.
Telemetry is an automated communications process by which measurements and other data are collected at remote or inaccessible points and transmitted to receiving equipment for monitoring. In a blogpost, Jayshree Ullal, CEO, Arista Networks mentioned, “Every network architect is looking for modern analytical methods to efficiently and consistently gain visibility into millions of devices, data and events. Arista’s state driven network infrastructure built on Arista EOS with NetDB (Network Database) delivers a network wide repository to coordinate many types of actions, leveraging open standards such as the ability to capture, stream, store, classify and view actions.”
“EOS streams the state of every network event, on every device, instantaneously, in order to provide granular mechanisms for real-time visibility into thousands of devices in a cloud network. The Arista Telemetry Tracers leverage open source solutions such as HBase and standards such as OpenConfig,” Ullal added.
The company claims that Arista EOS (Linux-based network OS) is a next-generation solution for data centers and cloud networks. EOS offers a set of software applications that provide workflow automation, high availability, network visibility and analytics and rapid integration with a wide range of third-party applications for virtualization, management, automation and orchestration services. EOS has a unique multi-process state sharing architecture that separates state information and packet forwarding from protocol processing and application logic.
CloudVision extends the same architectural approach across the network with a state-based view of the entire network. According to the company, CloudVision’s abstraction of the physical network to this broader, network-wide perspective allows for a more efficient approach for several operational and network telemetry use-cases. To leverage rich network data, the CloudVision platform’s analytics engine provides telemetry visualization for network-wide state.
Capabilities and benefits:
Prompt 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.