Arista Networks made its first big move to integrate its Big Switch acquisition, rolling out an enterprise-focused network observability software platform that provides network visibility across data centers, campus, and edge use cases.

The Arista DANZ Monitoring Fabric (DMF) combines its legacy Data Analyzer (DANZ) with Big Switch’s monitoring fabric software and runs on Arista’s switching platform. It adds service node software for packet processing, optimization, and flow generation; analytics node software for deep context-aware traffic analysis and machine learning; and recorder node software for full packet capture, query, and replay with built-in application identification.Those nodes support 40G to 320G performance with scale-out clustering support to allow for multi-terabit processing capacity.

Prashant Gandhi, VP for product line management at Arista and who came over with the Big Switch acquisition, said this combination provides for pervasive observability that delivers insights into network performance instead of just delivering packets.

“Providing a fully functional network packet broker in the form of DMF is not available from other networking vendors,” Gandhi said in an interview with SDxCentral. “Arista is very unique in the sense it is providing both the production network and also the monitoring network. And then on top of that layering these advanced performance monitoring capabilities and traffic capture capabilities are not even available with the traditional [network packet broker] player.”

Gandhi explained that the DMF platform also taps into Arista’s more recent acquisition of network detection and response (NDR) startup Awake Security to deliver traffic to various NDR ingests points for zero-trust security.

The DMF product is launching initially with general purpose observability and support for third-party open network platforms for general purpose monitoring. This will be across Arista’s 7050X3-series of switches. The vendor will be adding “mission-critical” observability capabilities early next year with lossless monitoring for its 7280R platform.

Arista’s Big Switch acquisition was first reported earlier this year by SDxCentral. Gandhi said the companies had since been working closely toward integrating their offerings, but had been somewhat hampered by the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic.

“Access to labs and equipment has been challenging to a say the least, but we’ve been able to with the startup culture that Arista has and its engineering technology-driven culture that has allowed us to realize the synergy of one-plus-one being more than two,” Gandhi said.

That acquisition reportedly saw Arista beat out rivals including Cisco, Dell Technologies, VMware, Juniper Networks, and Extreme Networks, according to a source.

Big Switch was a highly coveted target because of its Big Monitoring Fabric (Big Mon) hybrid cloud visibility and security product. It was viewed as key for enterprise customers that are increasingly adopting multicloud environments and need tools to monitor and orchestrate workloads across their data centers and in public clouds. It also put Arista in a better position to more directly compete against Cisco and its multicloud play.

Cisco has long dominated the campus networking market, and Arista’s been gunning for its rival since it entered campus switching a year ago. A recent IDC report on the Ethernet switch and router market had Cisco sitting on a 35.5% share of the service provider and enterprise router space. Arista was No. 3 behind Huawei at 6.4% of that market.

During Arista’s most recent earnings call, CEO Jayshree Ullal doubled down on the vendor’s goal to hit $200 million in campus networking revenue by the end of 2021. Arista reached its $100 million target during the second quarter.

Looking ahead, Gandhi said the company is focused on continuing Arista’s push for a more cognitive cloud approach to the market.

“We want to further that by bringing more intelligence,” he said. “Does [artificial intelligence] and NetOps deliver on that notion of a self-diagnostic environment, and I think that’s a tough nut to crack. But I think we have to slowly step-by-step get there so we can do provide more automation and the key is to get the baseline set up and I think that is something that we have now done.”

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct that Prashant Gandhi said “NetOps” and not “DevOps” as part of the quote in the last paragraph.