Arista goes big with network observability platform

Arista Networks has taken the wraps off a network observability platform that promises to help enterprise customers proactively manage tasks including problem resolution and root cause analysis as it works to boost application and workload performance.

The company’s CloudVision Universal Network Observability (CV UNO) system is designed to handle a data lake’s worth of network telemetry and analytical data and meld it with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to offer real-time network flow and application performance details, risk and incident analysis, and change impact management.

CV UNO will be available in the second quarter as a licensed premium component of Arista’s CloudVision as-a-service platform. CloudVision is Arista’s core cloud-based management platform, which delivers a view of the entire network and offers network orchestration, provisioning, telemetry, automation and analytics across data center, campus and edge enterprises.

“In the intricate dance of troubleshooting network, workload, application, and user issues, the goal is clear but daunting: prevent changes that would cause outages and cut down the time it takes to prove the network isn’t the culprit,” wrote Douglas Gourlay, vice president and general manager at Arista, in a blog about the CV UNO platform. 

“That’s where CV UNO comes in, because we’ve built a system that addresses risk analysis and impact analysis, that shifts from reactive to proactive. So, hopefully, you find a problem before it’s created,” Gourlay said. “And then when you need to be able to defend yourself and say it is or is not the network’s fault, CV UNO will give you accurate and informed root cause analysis based on the data that shows exactly where a problem is.”

Once turned on, CV UNO can discover all the networked components in the enterprise, including applications, hosts, and workloads across various platforms, IT systems of record, and inventory management systems, according to Praful Bhaidasna, product management leader at Arista.