R12.1-JA-2025June05
Public Cloud Network Visual Manager
As more and more IT workloads are being moved to the public cloud, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), operating the public cloud environment becomes challenging for IT specialists. Even if the automation and agility during the provisioning process have been greatly improved, it is not the same for the manageability of the public cloud environment. The main challenges of managing the public cloud consist of the following aspects:
- Lack of visibility: Agile provision of cloud resources makes visibility difficult using the traditional manual method.
- A huge number of accounts and subscriptions: To comply with the security requirements, you may have a huge number of accounts and subscriptions that are used by different teams. Managing all resources scattered in all these accounts and subscriptions brings a huge management burden to the team regarding troubleshooting cloud issues.
- Multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments: East-West Traffic supporting key applications often traverse physical data centers, SDN data centers, and the public cloud. You may also have different public cloud providers to prevent vendor lock-in. As a result, many organizations bring multiple public cloud providers into their production use, and you will need to understand different cloud providers’ uniqueness.
- Collaboration within different teams and customers: The application that traverses through your network may involve multiple teams: network team, security team, cloud team, server team, and application team. When a problem occurs, you may need to involve all the related teams to determine the root cause.
To provide the visibility of the public cloud becomes very critical, NetworkBrain has built out the support for AWS, Azure, and GCP, which consists of the following areas:
- Auto-Discovery: NetworkBrain can discover public cloud resources and update the data periodically by leveraging the benchmark function with the auto-discovery function.
- Review network data and config with dynamic mapping: Like what has been done for traditional network and SDN networks, NetworkBrain uses APIs to access the public cloud environment and provide the data model to build the map based on the data model. The system can periodically retrieve the data from public cloud providers and update the data model accordingly.
- Map application dependency across the end-to-end network: with the ability to build the data model for the public cloud, SDN, SD-WAN, and the traditional network, NetworkBrain can provide you with the path analysis function across the entire network. NetworkBrain can check the routing table/security group/network ACL for all the networking objects along the path and display the checking result details.
- SPOG access through cloud-native and 3rd party cloud management tools: NetworkBrain can use Data View Template (DVT) to display the cloud infrastructure data from the native cloud API, display the cloud monitoring data from the native cloud monitoring, and NetworkBrain can integrate with any of your cloud monitoring tools, Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace for example, to overlay the monitoring metrics/logging information on the NetworkBrain map.
- Cloud Intent-Based Automation: Leverage the NetworkBrain Problem Diagnosis Automation System (PDAS) to provide a powerful Public Cloud network intent diagnosis automation platform, which can be extended to various automated diagnostics for different customers' hybrid network use cases.
NetworkBrain can discover and visualize the following public cloud networks on dynamic maps: