NetQ Platform

* NetQ platform is the central platform that receives real-time telemetry data, providing visibility, network validation and trouble-shooting. The platform can run in a Virtual Machine or on the Cumulus NetQ hardware appliance.

* Intended for the data centre. Not an end to end automation solution (although possibly that is under development)

* NetQ 1 focussed on configuration and validation for such activities as BGP and EVPN configuration. And tracking IP addresses, VLANs and server status etc other general operational tasks.

* Cumulus claims that NetQ performs 3 primary functions:

* DATA COLLECTION – Real-time and historical telemetry and network state information

* DATA ANALYTICS – Deep processing of the data

* DATA VISUALIZATION – Rich Graphical User Interface (GUI) for actionable insight

* Agent driven – install agent onto Linux hosts including your Cumulus Linux devices.

* Integration with some third parties – Slack, syslog-ng, pagerduty. More to come I suspect

Larger Issues ?

* It’s pretty. Seriously, its visually nice.

* SDN is much more than deployment and configuration of network devices.

* In many ways, its more important to have analytics and monitoring tools to improve your knowledge about what is actually happening on the network and improving the mean time to innocence aka its not the network.

* Smaller companies can easily compete with bigger companies when making software. Mid-sized enterprises with modest networking requirements in the data centre, do not need the more complex products from Cisco which would require Cisco ACI with NAE, or Tetration to have an equivalent solution.