Arista Networks today announced CloudVision 2021, an expansion of its network management portal that promises to automate time-consuming and error-prone tasks and improve network visibility across LAN and wireless networks.

CloudVision was announced back in 2015 as Arista’s answer to Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure. Since then, CloudVision has evolved into a unified management and provisioning portal for the company’s data center campus and wireless portfolios. With today’s update, the company is extending several new capabilities around automation, telemetry, and analytics.

Arista’s goal with CloudVision 2021 is to link user and application experience to network deployments and operations, as well as to simplify the process of modifying complex network deployments.

“What we're doing is trying to take the day-to-day network operations — both the deployment and the ongoing operations side of it — and make it easier to communicate with that upper-level business need, both from a provisioning perspective — how things get deployed — as well as a feedback loop in terms of the assurance back to the business,” said Jeff Raymond, VP of EOS software and services at Arista.

According to Raymond, one of the challenges with managing large data center and enterprise networks is changes often need to be made via configuration files. These files allow operators to quickly make changes across the network infrastructure, but they require a familiarity with the syntax and protocol, and they are prone to errors, he explained.

“There are some challenges with automation in the enterprise,” he said. “It's not just a button you press.”

To address these challenges, Arista worked to compartmentalize configuration through a centralized “configlet” model that handles inheritance and reuse principles. The result is configuration changes are less likely to break something. And with CloudVision 2021, Arista is taking this a step further with the launch of Studios.

“Studios is a new infrastructure capability within CloudVision for basically taking that configuration [and] instead of dealing with that configuration in kind of that config syntax, which still will exist, we're creating that configuration at higher level data models,” Raymond said. “These data models allow us to interact with that configuration on a more agile basis.”

The result is a graphical interface for creating templates to automate basic tasks, like opening a port for a new phone line, he explained.

These templates are not, however, the same as set-up wizards common on many networking appliances. Raymond explains that most set-up wizards know nothing about the rest of the network and simply modify the config file with new values. If the network isn’t configured just right, the wizard will fail, and the operator will have to manually modify the configuration file.

In CloudVision Studio, these templates are cognizant of the rest of the network, enabling operators to make changes without having to dive into a command-line interface (CLI) or push a new config file.

In addition to allowing users to build their own templates, Arista is also bundling several pre-configured templates of its own.

In addition to automating many day-to-day operations, CloudVision 2021 also introduces several new capabilities intended to improve network visibility across supported switch and wireless LAN hardware.

While it has been possible to gather some network telemetry using simple network management protocol (SNMP) polling CloudVision will now support real-time state steaming via inband network telemetry (INT). Arista claims this capability will open the door to predictive analytics.

“When you look at this data, it’s actually giving you real-time information: state of latency within your network,” said Ed Chapman, VP of strategic alliances at Arista. “In addition, because it's streaming into our backend database … you can actually go back in time and pull that information out.”

For WiFi, things are a bit more complicated as there are more variables to take into account.

“Access points are the primary point of integration now for anybody in a campus environment,” Chapman said, adding that because of this Arista has taken steps to better visualize network performance for users connecting over WiFi.

CloudVision 2021 introduces quality of experience, radio frequency, and performance monitoring dashboards to address these challenges.

The quality of experience dashboard is especially important as it allows users to dig into how applications are performing on the network, Chapman explained. The dashboard works by using machine learning to identify applications across the network and determine whether they are behaving as they should be. Based on this, Arista is able to automatically remediate many issues as they pop up, he added.

And thanks to integrated deep packet inspection (DPI) capabilities on Arista’s wireless access points, it's possible to identify more than 250 applications.

Arista is trialing CloudVision 2021 now and plans to launch the service in the second quarter of 2021.