Arista CloudVision
A Platform for Cloud Automation and Visibility

Overview:

CloudVision is Arista’s modern, multi-domain management platform that leverages cloud networking principles to deliver a simplified NetOps experience. Unlike traditional domain-specific management solutions, CloudVision enables zero-touch network operations with consistent operations enterprise-wide, helping to break down the complexity of siloed management approaches.

As Arista’s platform for Network as-a-Service, CloudVision is designed to bring OpEx efficiency through automation across the entire network lifecycle - from design, to operations, to support and ongoing maintenance.

CloudVision is built on a Network Data Lake (NetDL) architecture that leverages realtime state to provide an abstraction of the physical network to a broader, network-wide perspective allowing for a more efficient approach for several operational and network telemetry capabilities including the following highlights:

• Multi-domain scope, bringing consistent network operations to Data Center, Campus, WAN/Interconnect, Media & Entertainment, and multi-cloud use-cases
• Cloud-native architecture, offered with the same feature set across both cloud service (SaaS) and on-prem appliance (virtual or physical) deployment options.
• Real-time state streaming for network telemetry and analytics - a modern approach to replace legacy polling per device
• State repository, analytics engines and telemetry views to provide an unprecedented level of granularity in real-time monitoring and historic network state for forensic troubleshooting
• Cognitive analytics, leveraging the rich NetDL data source as the basis for training AI/ML models to generate better recommendations and insights for operators
• Turn-key automation with CloudVision Studios for initial and ongoing provisioning, ZTP as-a-Service, configuration management and network-wide change control–including automated upgrades, network rollback, and network snapshots
• Compliance dashboard for security audit, patch and lifecycle management
• Support for the Unified edge, with wired and wireless views and dashboards, including IoTvision™
• NetDevOps workflows, providing extensibility for CloudVision to integrate into a broader continuous integration (CI) pipeline
• Cloud Tracer™ for visibility into the availability of network connectivity and services across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments
• Macro-Segmentation Services to provide automated and seamless service insertion with integrations by partner security platforms
• IP Broadcast operations, including specific dashboards and Media Control Services (MCS) integration with technology partners
• Centralized API gateway for both northbound and southbound integrations, leveraging OpenConfig, gRPC, and REST APIs

Ecosystem Integration

Arista’s customers are trying to orchestrate workflows across their physical and virtual infrastructure. Arista CloudVision is the platform for deeper integration with a broad array of Arista’s ecosystem partner solutions, including Ansible, Forescout, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, VMWare NSX and many others.

CloudVision Highlights

Cloud Automation for Everyone
Arista CloudVision simplifies complex time and resource intensive tasks in a turnkey software solution designed to help customers move to a more automated, cloud-like infrastructure.

Multi-Domain Service
Real-time state is streamed from wired and wireless devices from the entire enterprise, from DC to campus to WAN. This state is stored in NetDL, a state-based, cloudhosted, network-wide data lake, enabling cognitive analytics as a multi-domain service.

Network Telemetry & Analytics
CloudVision brings a modern approach to network telemetry and a replacement for legacy polling mechanisms. AVA, Arista’s Autonomous Virtual Assist engine for analytics, takes full advantage of the state streaming infrastructure of EOS and NetDL to give Arista customers an unprecedented level of visibility with a time-series view of the entire network, across data center, campus, public clouds and WAN.

NetOps Automation
Addressing the spectrum of operator types in NetOps environments, CloudVision includes out-of-the-box, point n’ click automated provisioning, through to integration with CI pipelines. All aligned with Arista best practice designs for a consistent experience.

Open API Integrations
CloudVision is Arista’s API gateway for physical network integration with third party services. Integrate with network overlay controllers, DevOps platforms and network services solutions such as Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow and others. Built on modern REST and gRPC-based APIs, to both simplify and scale network integration.

CV UNO:

CloudVision Universal Network ObservabilityTM(CV UNOTM) is Arista’s modern, multi-domain network observability platform that integrates application visibility with CloudVision’s already powerful network telemetry base in providing unparalleled insights into application and workload performance across data centers, campuses, and wide area networks. It harnesses the power of NetDL architecture and AVA-driven proactive analysis and prescriptive recommendations, accelerating root-cause identification and propelling rapid issue resolution. This innovative solution proactively reduces human error, streamlines issue resolution for unforeseen events and provides precise root cause analysis of network events and their impact on application delivery.

Key CV UNO benefits:

1. Integrated Workload Application and Infrastructure Visibility
   CV UNO constructs a composite picture of the entire network and application environment - essentially an application-to-network graph. This graph is continually refreshed and stored in a time-series database, providing a dynamic, historical account of the environment's evolution and state, ensuring deep visibility and understanding of application flows through the network at any given moment.
2. Proactive Risk Analysis
   CloudVision’s change control workflows (including AVD) leverages CV UNO’s application intelligence, empowering organizations to scrutinize potentially disruptive network changes rigorously before their deployment into production and mission-critical networks, ensuring operational resilience and stability.
3. Realtime Impact Analysis
   When an application performance is impacted, CV UNO, without deploying any host-based agents, is able to quickly help the operator or engineer answer the critical question “is the issue on the network or in the application?” by driving to the accurate root cause of the issue, thereby reducing the resolution time and simplifying cross-functional coordination for the operations team.

CV UNO - Arista’s Platform for Network Observability

CloudVision Universal Network Observability Enabling Self-Diagnostic Networks

Available as a premium feature set on Arista CloudVision as-a-Service(CVaaS), CV UNO leverages one or more CV UNO Sensor VMs, strategically deployed on-premises to collect, normalize, and meticulously curate flow/SNMP data from diverse sources such as physical/virtual compute and third-party network devices. This holistic data is then coupled with CloudVision’s deep view of the networking state and stored into NetDL. CV UNO then harnesses machine intelligence-based analysis on this composite NetDL data to identify application and topology-aware correlations across events, application behavior changes, and application flow anomalies. This advanced functionality accelerates impact analysis and expedites issue resolution with unprecedented efficiency delivering a comprehensive, 360o observability powered by the following key feature highlights:

• Private cloud visibility, leveraging API integration with VMware vCenter to augment application, flow and event information into NetDL data
• Application Discovery workflows to discover and classify applications
• Application Dashboard page, that shows all the applications, application health, performance, services, critical events, top bandwidth consumers and more
• Application Dependency Mapping topology overlaid with flow metrics (like latency, data usage etc) to not only visualize interaction between application services but also enable faster root cause analysis
• Application Flow graph, that visualizes directional, bandwidth-aware, inter-service application flows
• DANZ Monitoring Fabric (DMF) as a Data source to support collection of end-to-end TCP analysis and flow data generated from DMF
• Enhanced 3rd Party Device Visibility to also support flow data collection from 3rd party devices into NetDL. This extends CV’s SNMP based 3rd Party Device support.
• End-to-End Visualization that elevates CV’s network topology visualization to now display physical / virtual end hosts in the topology, showing how applications are connected to the network and also identifying application flow-level potential bottlenecks or performance issues.
• Enhanced CV’s Fault / Anomaly Detection, Event Correlation, Inference and Alerting algorithms to also take application context, application events, end-to-end TCP analysis events in consideration in addition to CV’s network-centric events.

Solution:

CloudVision provides the following features and benefits:

Features:

CloudVision Solution

The CloudVision solution is comprised of three components: CloudVision Portal, CloudVision eXchange, and CloudVision CUE (Cognitive Unified Edge). These components provide the platform for both orchestration and automation for wired and wireless networks as follows:

• CloudVision Portal is a web platform and associated historical database built to automate the workflows for a variety of network provisioning, change management, and monitoring tasks. Available for on-premises deployments (virtual or physical appliance) as well as cloud service delivery with CloudVision as-a-Service.
• CloudVision eXchange is a EOS-based network-wide multi-function control point providing a single access point for realtime provisioning, orchestration and integration with third party controllers and services.
• CloudVision CUE (Cognitive Unified Edge) is a centralized management plane that simplifies policy management, provisioning and troubleshooting of WiFi networks while delivering richer telemetry to network administrators.

CloudVision Portal Features

The following table summarizes the main features of Arista’s CloudVision Portal.

General Platform and Telemetry Features

Provisioning Features

CloudVision eXchange Features

The following table summarizes the main features of Arista’s CloudVision eXchange.

* Applicable to CloudVision as-a-Service offering only

Specifications:

CloudVision Deployment Models

The following describes the deployment models for CloudVision Portal

Documentation:

Download the Arista CloudVision Datasheet (PDF).