As a network automation platform, NetBrain significantly enhances network observability by providing real-time, actionable insights into the network’s behavior and performance.
NetBrain-powered observability plays a major role in operations that strive to be more proactive and agile, especially when responding to new or changing conditions and requirements.
Network observability concerns fully understanding the internal state of a network based on the data it generates, like metrics, logs, and traces. It goes beyond traditional network monitoring by providing deeper insights into network performance, behavior, and potential issues.
Observability vs. Monitoring: What’s the Difference?
At first glance, one might confuse network monitoring with observability in that it is the process of continuously observing a network’s components, such as devices, traffic, and connections, to ensure proper operation. This is achieved primarily through protocols such as SNMP polls and traps. It focuses primarily on the collection and reporting of data related to network performance and availability.
While monitoring can be automated, interpretations, correlations and analysis of the polled data must be made manually. It’s also usually focused on device health, rather than on network health from an end-user perspective.
Effective network observability, on the other hand, should provide deeper insights into the network’s internal state, focusing on understanding not just what is happening in the network, but also why it is happening. Network observability involves a more holistic approach, integrating metrics, logs, traces, and other data sources to offer a complete picture of network behavior.
Combine Automation and GenAI for Enhanced Observability
Enhanced by AI and automation, network observability can maintain network health, optimize performance, and ensure security. It provides a holistic network view, enabling teams to ask complex queries of their networks in natural language and receive actionable insights.
AI leverages natural language to get network information from experts without having to explain how to solve a problem to the handler, leveraging unlimited memory and machine speed.
Weaving together powerful no-code automation, a GenAI natural language co-pilot bot, with human expertise, network observability achieves the power of human intelligence at machine speed based on each organization’s unique hybrid network.
With AI, human intelligence is augmented, turning complex problem-solving into machine-speed operations. This allows for the creation of intelligent agents that guide the automation process, transforming human expertise into automated workflows.
These agents can create maps, answer anything about your network, run a set of steps as part of an action plan for troubleshooting diagnostics, validate configurations against golden baselines, and generate monitoring dashboards for things like slow applications and device status.
How Does NetBrain Network Automation Work?
Beginning with a live, continuously updated model of your multi-vendor network, incorporating real-time configurations, traffic forwarding, and device states, NetBrain adds application-aware Network Intents—the desired behavior of your business infrastructure—for a true Digital Twin that supports live automated assessments and diagnoses of your network’s performance and health across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.
Rather than relying on device metrics made available to monitoring systems, NetBrain Intents connect directly on the network management plane to collect telemetry not available via SNMP and form the no-code building blocks of NetBrain automation.
Intents perform, holistic, human-level diagnosis on the entire network and NetBrain dashboards present hundreds of real network analyses, not just alerts, from a single screen.
By integrating with major ITSM systems and supporting multi-vendor environments, NetBrain triggers intelligent actions via REST API and webhooks, northbound or southbound, to automate key NetOps workflows like outage prevention, incident response and troubleshooting, security policy enforcement, lifecycle management, change management, and network audits.
Why Pursue Network Observability with NetBrain?
NetBrain’s no-code network automation platform combines the real-time data feeding its Digital Twin technology with continuous, intent-based network assessments to ensure compliance, performance, and security across your multi-vendor network including on-prem, multi-cloud, and SDN infrastructure.
NetBrain powers key network observability goals:
- Proactive Issue Detection: By analyzing metrics, logs, and traffic paths, network teams can identify and resolve issues before they affect users.
- Root Cause Analysis: When problems arise, NetBrain allows for more effective troubleshooting by providing comprehensive data and automated analysis of what happened and why.
- Performance Optimization: Continuous visibility into the network and intelligent assessments allow for fine-tuning and optimization of network performance.
- Security Compliance: NetBrain network observability helps detect configuration drift, poor security posture, and open vulnerabilities to security threats.
All with the network intelligence from human expertise and know-how combined with the power of no-code automation and the ease of GenAI natural language search.
FAQ
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What are the key benefits of network observability?
- Improved Troubleshooting: Observability provides deeper insights and contextual analysis, making it easier to pinpoint where and why issues occur.
- Proactive Issue Resolution: Observability helps identify abnormal patterns and behaviors before they become critical issues, allowing teams to address potential problems proactively.
- Comprehensive Visibility: End-to-end observability allows for cross-layer correlation across different layers (e.g., application, network, and infrastructure), providing a holistic view of how changes or issues in one area might affect others.
- Cost Efficiency: Observability eliminates waste expenditures through resource optimization and reduced downtime.
- Support for Modern Architectures: Observability scales with the network even as they become more complex with the adoption of cloud services, microservices, and hybrid architectures.
What NetBrain automation solutions support observability?
- Auto-Discovery: Automatically discover your network inventory via device CLI, API, or SNMP interfaces.
- Dynamic Maps and Path: Visualize and interact with live network maps for real-time insights.
- Network Intents: Automate assessments and ensure intended operational behaviors.
- No-Code Automation: Simplify automation via GUI requiring no coding or scripting.
- Continuous Assessment: Execute diagnoses of your entire network proactively and continually to identify potential issues before they cause a problem.
- Automated Diagnosis: Trigger automated intelligent troubleshooting captured from your experts’ network skills.
- Change Management: Execute automated, error-free network changes and validations.
- Assessment Dashboards: Visually summarize hundreds of real-time automated assessment results on one screen.
- Automation Chatbot: Provide network automation capabilities to a wider audience via custom, self-service chat portal.