Arista adds network change analysis to CloudVision

An enterprise's data center modernization effort typically includes upgrading software for monitoring and troubleshooting network infrastructure. Arista is targeting those initiatives with software that evaluates the impact of configuration and design changes on network and application performance.

Arista recently launched CloudVision Universal Network Observability (CV UNO) to bolster its network management product portfolio. The latest capabilities tackle many of the same problems addressed by companies like IP Fabric and Forward Networks.

"This is a very useful new product from Arista," said Shamus McGillicuddy, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "It's really hard to validate a network change both before and after you do it."

Enterprises often validate changes by watching for an alert in their monitoring software. That after-the-fact approach is among many other poor techniques used by network managers.

"IT organizations take a variety of approaches to change validation, and many of them are bad," McGillicuddy said.

Arista sells CV UNO as a premium add-on to CloudVision, the company's cloud-based dashboard of network management applications. CloudVision covers the data center and the wireless LAN, competing with the Meraki and Mist consoles from Cisco and Juniper Networks respectively.

Initially, CV UNO works with only data center infrastructure, McGillicuddy said. He added that he expects Arista to eventually expand the product's capabilities to campus networks and the WAN. More than 91% of Arista's Ethernet switch revenue come from its data center hardware and software, according to IDC.

CV UNO analyzes network changes to assess their impact on business applications and workloads, including those on virtualization platforms. It performs the change analysis on information drawn from Arista's Network Data Lake, the data source for all the company's infrastructure management software.

Along with assessing network changes, CV UNO builds a composite picture of the entire network and application environment. It also creates a continuously updated application-to-network graph to provide a historical record.

Arista charges more for CV UNO and optional components, including the following:

• CV UNO Recorder Node, which adds packet capture, query and packet replay. The feature is helpful in security scenarios, including forensics, intrusion detection and threat response.
• CV UNO Service Node, which provides advanced packet processing, such as application latency analysis and application identification and classification based on deep packet inspection. DPI is an advanced method for examining network traffic.
• CV UNO Analytics Node, which delivers context-aware traffic analysis through machine learning.

In a recent survey of 558 IT and business professionals, TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group found that 42% planned to increase the use of application or infrastructure monitoring tools over the next 18 months. Enterprises are upgrading the tools to support modernization projects related to hybrid cloud deployments, ESG said.

Antone Gonsalves is an editor at large for TechTarget Editorial, reporting on industry trends critical to enterprise tech buyers. He has worked in tech journalism for 25 years and is based in San Francisco.