Arista today rolled out a new approach for networking customers to see the complete state of their network devices in real time.

Traditionally, the state of network devices is polled every several minutes, and the state data is averaged. But cloud providers have been hankering to turn off polling. They’d rather monitor the state of devices continually.

Arista’s CloudVision platform now streams network state data from switches and routers to provide customers with real-time and historic visibility into their networks.

“What we’re talking about here is improved visibility for network operations in the area of telemetry,” says Jeff Raymond, Arista’s VP of EOS products and services. “We’re focusing on the network device state.”

The new telemetry offering, to be available in the fourth quarter, uses Arista’s Extensible Operating System (EOS). It also uses NetDB (Network Database), which Arista introduced earlier this year. NetDB is a feature of EOS’ centralized database of network state. It has the ability to stream information about network state, so that listening devices can monitor the network in real time. All that state data is streamed from each device back to a central database, providing a network-wide state database.

Arista’s improved CloudVision takes the lessons learned from cloud titans — which stream state and handle the data natively — and packages them for everybody else.

“This is an entirely software-based solution,” says Raymond. “We’d like to give our existing customers a chance to take advantage of this capability. The streaming agents on devices are already packaged on EOS today.”

Arista says the new telemetry capabilities will also help with security. “Lots of tools are working on predictive analysis,” says Raymond. “The trick there is that 'predictive' is only as good as the data it’s based on.”

Arista is working with security firm Veriflow. “If they move from a polling-based model to a streaming-based model, they can provide a richer output in terms of their algorithm,” he says.

The new telemetry is built on standard RESTful APIs as well as OpenConfig-based infrastructure, providing a point for integration for a variety of partners.

“We’ve built a common infrastructure so that as more OpenConfig data models are defined, customers don’t have to change the infrastructure,” says Raymond.

Other partners of Arista can also leverage the more granular data from the new CloudVision telemetry. In addition to Veriflow, the new offering has been endorsed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), SAP, and VMware.