Cumulus Networks today continued its mission to eliminate network complexity with the release of the third iteration of its NetQ telemetry and validation platform.

NetQ uses telemetry data to correlate configuration and operation status across the network to identify and track state changes while improving the overall visibility of the network. With NetQ 3.0, Cumulus is taking that a step further, introducing lifecycle management capabilities to the product, which are designed to make it easier for users to roll out updates and configuration files with the push of the button.

This isn’t an entirely new idea, admits Partho Mishra, president and chief production officer. Enterprises have been doing this for years using custom automation scripts and it's how hyperscalers and large “Fortune 50-type” companies have approached the problem, he explained.

The company has been pressured by its customers to make the deployment and management of Cumulus switches more intuitive. “We had a lot of requests from our customers for providing the capability not just to give visibility to what’s happening on the network, but to give them tools that would allow them to deploy their network, as in install software on switches, upgrade the software on switches, upgrade configurations, and so on and so forth,” explained Mishra.

Cumulus initially worked to develop automation scripts for customers using Ansible, and to a lesser degree, Chef, SaltStack, and Puppet. However, this proved to be a slow process, said Mishra. So, the company open sourced the scripts and worked to build a community around the problem.

However, this didn’t address the subset of Cumulus customers that simply weren’t comfortable with or didn’t have time to make sense of the scripts. “There are customers that are not comfortable developing these scripts,” Mishra said.

Cumulus set out to remedy this by making it easier for IT teams to construct automation scripts using a more intuitive graphical interface in NetQ 3.0. It features a new software upgrade management component, which is designed to prevent network disruptions while pushing software upgrades and patches to the switches.

The company also claims the software can identify how many switches are on the network and then determine how many can be upgraded in parallel without causing a disruption. And if something were to go wrong, Cumulus provides the ability to roll back changes the last known stable state.

For the moment NetQ is focused on providing telemetry data and enabling IT teams to more easily configure the network, but Cumulus has aspirations for greater degrees of automation.

The company is looking at ways to detect issues and suggest ways to address them, according to Mishra. “That’s not all quite there, it will come over the course of the next few months."