So in the first two talks from Juniper we discussed building a network via automation, and the second was on AI cluster creation and the networking issues that came from that. Now our discussion is around operations analytics and what Apstra does in order to help operations to understand what is happening and what should be happening.

First thing needed via operations within Apstra, is to identify the source of the data. We were able to see here where they are able to utilize the gui to open a cli to run commands and find errors within the network.

Once the source of the data is found and is built, then you can build an IBA probe to reference your area of telemetry. This is utilizing a graph database and is able to validate data within the data in other areas. For more information about a graph database look here: https://aws.amazon.com/nosql/graph/

Because you are pulling data, injecting it into a graph database you are then able to leverage graph to tell you more about what is happening in the whole solution. If you click the link about the graph database you would find out that this is basically leveraging the way Graph works with the data that you are pulling.

Once the data has gone through this journey it’s then presented to a dashboard in order to consume the data visually. This is the core component from this solution because it generates the data that you want to generate, and the display it fully for folks to see in order to consume the data was you would like.

Finally, flow data can be utilized in order to connect and utilize the consumption via s-flow, net flow data. This deploys the flow through the pipes and then reports back what the packet data would look like through the data.

Thoughts:

This seems like a really good Data Analytics solution to help customers of Apstra to be able to see the data that they need to validate and understand. This also can be utilized for analytics to things that are broken and things that need to be adjusted. I see this a lot when we talk about solutions like Aria Operations and the solutions that it presents because it’s utilized for that dashboard. However, this is more in-line with Aria Graph as it pulls in data via the graph relationships and builds an understanding of what is running and what is related to another resource. Its really cool how this can be build and grown for customers and very interesting how Apstra is using it.