Arista adds cloud, automation features

Arista Networks has added intelligent features to its core CloudVision management platform to help manage and automate distributed workloads.

CloudVision provides wired and wireless visibility, orchestration, provisioning, telemetry, and analytics across the data center, campus, and more recently, IoT devices on edge networks. CloudVision’s network information can be utilized by Arista networking partners such as VMware and Microsoft.

To that mix, Arista has added what it calls CloudVision 2021 and CloudVision Studios, which adds network intelligence capabilities to more easily automate and manage workflows across Arista-based networks.

CloudVision Studios offers built-in workflows for many common configuration-related tasks, including templating for initial campus build-outs, workflows for adding incremental network capacity, and basic day-to-day helpdesk-driven changes, Arista said. In addition, CloudVision Studios can be created or customized for any feature set, avoiding inflexible ‘wizard’ interfaces found in legacy network management systems.

“The CloudVision Studios enables network semantics based on outcomes and roles instead of the cumbersome device-by-device configurations of today. CloudVision Studios was uniquely designed to deliver this abstraction through network-wide data and role-based models,” wrote Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO of Arista in a blog about the upgrades. 

Enterprise customers can automate daily campus tasks to translate business needs into flexible operations and improved experience, Ullal stated.

“CloudVision’s inherent state and AI-driven architecture with the latest data-plane telemetry further enhance the user and application experience,” Ullal stated. “This includes operator alerts for network and application issues and related remediation recommendations.”

In addition to the CloudVision Studios enhancements, the CloudVision 2021 system can now receive Inband Network Telemetry (INT) data, which will let customers see and act on latency and path telemetry across a suite of Arista’s latest switching platforms. The idea is that CloudVision will offer network operators views of network congestion hotspots while providing visibility that helps them identify the root-cause of network performance problems across campus and data-center networks, Arista stated. 

Some other new features include:

• A Quality of Experience (QoE) Dashboard–An expanded dashboard for CloudVision supports QoE monitoring for up to 25 applications, including Office 365, Google Workspace, Workday, Salesforce and other enterprise application suites. The platform currently supports video collaboration tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
• A Performance Dashboard that includes a root-cause analysis engine to monitor end-user experience, including application, radio frequency interference, network, and client-specific analytics such as DNS and DHCP state to provide a unified view of the end-user experience and automated remedial action recommendations.
• CloudVision Radio Frequency (RF) Explorer lets customers monitor, manage and proactively troubleshoot live and historical RF-related issues.

The new CloudVision 2021 features are in customer trials and will be generally available in Q2 2021.