The best way to monitor the network is to take pulse of everything in real-time. That in essence was the message from Arista Networks during their Networking Field Day presentation earlier this month.
“When it comes to a problem happening in the network that’s impacting your users, understanding that that’s happening before your user opens the ticket,” can provide significant edge to a company looking to deliver an even experience, said Andre Pech, VP of software.
CloudVision, Arista’s flagship orchestration and automation solution, helps get a sense of what’s happening in the network as they are happening, he said.
A decade old now, CloudVision seeks to address a persistent problem in networking – broken visibility, and stilted access to network data.
SNMP tools are an easy pick for polling tasks, which explains their ubiquity in enterprises even today. They can poll devices and stream back data points that are helpful for monitoring and management tasks. Broad compatibility and low cost on top of that have made it a standard through decades.
But SNMP is not “the solution”, argues Peche. It struggles to produce in-depth, sub-minute data that is considered a necessity with modern network monitoring. SNMP’s infrequent polling, limited scope and low data granularity are an obstacle course for network operators, often leading to incorrect and unreliable readings.
“And when you don’t have access to the data, you turn to the CLI (command line interface)”, reminded Peche, which is often intimidating for non-technical people.
Arista’s CloudVision adds a series of well-thought-out capabilities built on a top-down approach. The goal is to provide unrestricted visibility of the network by focusing on some key pointers – how is the network performing, are users having any issues, and how quickly can one get to meantime to innocence or remediation, Peche said.
CloudVision streams network states in real-time, capturing every state change with sub-second granularity, a sharp contrast to the legacy per-device polling approach.
This data is stored in a scale-out database for historical access, and users can compare data points across time using its time series view. The broad visibility of network data also facilitates live monitoring and troubleshooting.
“Traditionally you have your flow collector, and your management collector. But you really want both of them together….We bring it all into one place,” Peche told.
CloudVision captures both flow data and control plane packet data. “This is how we’re able to expose the full state of the network and continue to add features without having to upgrade the network.”
With CloudVision’s integrated flow tracker providing visibility into traffic patterns with real-time flow record streaming, operators can up their capacity planning and gain better understanding of the origins of latency issues.
CloudVision, under the hood, taps into Arista’s core offering, Extensible Operating System or EOS.
“A lot of this is enabled by EOS and its state-based architecture. We have built CloudVision to stream all of the state off-box. This includes interface counters but also everything you can get from the CLI.”
CloudVision’s scope of visibility is a big leap towards AI-based predictive monitoring. Peche explained with an example.
“We built a model looking at all of the transceiver data in our network. We ended up building a model that looked across these that today can predict about six weeks earlier that a transceiver is going to fail.”
He hopes this super-granularity is going to continue to be a big differentiator for the platform, as it competes with newer solutions.
Arista Networks is a big believer of “building it right” and invests continually towards enriching its solutions to deliver cutting-edge features and bring more use cases into the fold. Core to CloudVision is the same platform-focused mentality that allows the company to elastically expand the product with layers of innovation instead of building new solutions from scratch.
“We built it as a scale-out, multi-tenant, cloud service architecture knowing that this is where we wanted to go.”
However, CloudVision is not designed to subsume point products. Many of Arista’s customers use SNMP tools in tandem with CloudVision. Their coexistence allows for improved triaging and faster response.
“The goal is to really make it easy to debug and understand everything you can about the network,” he said.
Watch Arista Networks’ presentations from Networking Field Day event to watch CloudVision in action and get a closer look at the feature-set.
