Arista next-gen telemetry, analytics solutions for modern cloud networks

Arista’s partner ecosystem can leverage many benefits of this new telemetry solution

Arista Networks announced next-generation telemetry and analytics capabilities designed for modern cloud networks. The new Arista EOS^® (Extensible Operating System) and CloudVision® features provide customers with deep visibility into today’s network workloads, workflows, and workstreams on a network-wide basis, accelerating completion of day-to-day tasks and reducing operational costs.

“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, 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.”

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 visualisation 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 utilisation, 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 visualisation 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.

Arista partner ecosystem benefits

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.

Arista’s CloudVision Telemetry solution is endorsed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, SAP, Veriflow and VMware.

Arista EOS availability across networks

Arista EOS supports a wide variety of telemetry-focused capabilities for network visibility. The latest additions to the Arista Telemetry solution will be available as follows:

• EOS NetDB Streaming is available in EOS today.
• CloudVision Telemetry will be available in Q4, 2016.
• Ecosystem integration with Arista Telemetry is available on a partner-by-partner basis.