Arista’s Telemetry product allows you to stream network state in real-time from each piece of switching hardware to a central management point. Recently I’ve been waiting to prove out the visibility of the Telemetry product during a maintenance event. I recently had the opportunity when we were switching carriers on a transatlantic link between two sites.

The screenshot below shows a 30 minute slice of time where fiber optic links were brought down on Carrier A, traffic flow changed, connectivity was restored with Carrier B, and normal traffic flow resumed.

1 – Technicians disconnect fiber for the Primary Circuit at sites A and B.
2 – As the routing neighbor between the A and B sites drop, traffic is automatically moved to the Secondary Circuits.
3 – When optical connectivity has been restored between the two sites, the Primary Circuit re-establishes. Routing reconverges and traffic is shifted back onto the Primary Circuit.

Normal workflow for a change like this involves camping Syslog and the various switches involved, issuing commands to show network activity as the maintenance progressed. With Arista’s Telemetry product, I was able to see the state of various network components (light levels, interface state, bit rate, etc) all in a real-time display.

So far an impressive way to gain visibility into network state across a bunch of different metrics at a glance. I’m looking forward to test this product with my other future projects.