Mapping & Digital Twin

SOLUTION BRIEF Network Mapping and the Digital Twin The foundation for no-code network automation ® In today’s world, applications are everything and when the network they reside upon stops working, the possibility of key portions of any business grinding to a halt is a major concern, with potentially dire consequences. Thus, network operations professionals become the lifeblood of business and their ability to maintain those hybrid networks starts with their ability to visualize the entire network across locations, regardless of the mix of vendors and device form factors (physical, virtual, software-defined – at the edge and in the cloud). To ensure the business applications are delivered without disruptions, they must have visibility into the relationships between devices, as well as the application paths traversing the network – all in real time. In the end, each application designer or architect requires a certain level of service from the production network, and it is the goal for network operations to deliver upon their design intentions 24x7. NetBrain’s Digital Twin Enables Dynamic Maps The concept of building a comprehensive “Digital Twin”, or And if the Digital Twin is real-time and has contextual robust virtual model of the physical and logical topologies application flow understanding, then any changes desired has risen in importance. Digital twins are important for to the network intents can be made upon the Digital Twin process modeling, business continuity, and to maintain which is ultimately reflected upon the devices themselves. up-to-date documentation for increasingly complex This is the core of the NetBrain system and its Digital Twin - technology infrastructures. to enable intelligent and well- informed Day-2 operations across any hybrid network.

SOLUTION BRIEF Network Mapping and the Digital Twin Discovers the Entire Eliminates Cloud Documents Anything Get Proactive Network Blind Spots Exportable dynamic Actionable visibility Create real-time End-to-end visibility diagrams and reports means you can do maps on demand with across multi-vendor give you the data you more to ensure connectivity, infrastructure, SDN need anytime. performance and performance, and and SD-WAN and security directly from security detail. public clouds. maps. A More Robust Data Model The auto-discovery of the hybrid network that creates the • Dynamic and Hybrid-Multi-Cloud Mapping - NetBrain Digital Twin in NetBrain extracts the plethora of rich data automates the operations of today’s hybrid multi-cloud that exists within your network’s infrastructure devices. infrastructures, from discovery, inventory, and status to Using a combination of automated SNMP, SSH/CLI, and API performance, maintenance, and troubleshooting in a mechanisms and NetBrain’s patented neighbor discovery single pane of glass of all available network algorithms, NetBrain understands even the largest performance data. environments, from public cloud to remote edge, with • Real-time data - NetBrain is constantly updating its scalable efficiency. Typical Digital Twin models only account underlying data model, providing real-time telemetry for for the device and topology network levels and are not based the most accurate Digital Twin of your network. NetBrain on real-time data. A digital model that could be days or dynamically models any hybrid multi-cloud network in weeks old and does not look at real-time traffic flows based real-time and builds automation on top of it. on routing tables and other decision attributes will be unable to keep an accurate understanding of the network. An important capability of Digital Twins is the ability to perform ongoing auto-discovery of the entire network. Organizations require always up to date documentation of their networks for audit, troubleshooting and reporting purposes. NetBrain can dynamically map any part of the hybrid network in seconds with its real-time Dynamic Maps. NetBrain is a true automation platform that allows automated diagnostics and change management because it understands the concept of flow logic and intent-based management. • Multi-Layer Context – NetBrain enables you to discover, visualize and automate the operations of your hybrid- cloud services, automatically recording detailed device and connectivity information with full topological context from the device level to the intent level. Real- • Integrates 3rd-Party Data - NetBrain’s data model time contextual visibility and understanding enables the includes network management data via an open API full range of no-code network automation capabilities interface and specific out-of-the-box connectors built for found in NetBrain, assuring your hybrid infrastructure these tools, including Datadog and Splunk. More continues to deliver its design intentions. contextual information deepens your understanding of the network at-a-glance allowing you to act quickly. • Scalable - which is an architectural limitation and not easily overcome. The value of the digital twin is to enable scalable no-code automation. • Enables no-code network automation - This model understands business requirements and translates them into network intents which drives automation.

SOLUTION BRIEF Network Mapping and the Digital Twin The net result is the NetBrain system, and its Digital Twin Documentation and Reporting foundation can deliver robust hybrid network topology Even in today’s modern detail as an output, suitable for consumption by a number networks, up-to-date of other processes. documentation does not NetBrain’s Digital Twin allows for dynamic visualization exist because it must be and by doing so, provides a highly intelligent control plane manually produced and which allows collaborative real-time problem solving and updated. Manual, or ‘dated maintains business continuity preventing disruption. The documentation,’ is an issue Digital Twin itself is live, so that changes made in the NetOps has unsuccessfully network are reflected in the digital twin, and vice versa. dealt with for years. Users can save their existing Knowledge is Everything Dynamic Map views and Every network operations team knows the essential nature export them into native and of having up-to-date network mapping and documentation editable Microsoft Visio and when solving network problems in today’s business critical Word with the click of a environments. And they know that legacy approaches mean button. that their documentation is usually out-of-date and may be NetBrain’s Dynamic Maps differ from traditional significant inaccurate. This leads to inability or delay to manual ways of doing network documentation in finding and diagnosing network problems, more resources multiple ways: and time spent preparing for audits, and a longer learning curve for new network engineers to come up to speed. Auto-discovers every device on the network. NetBrain NetBrain’s Data View is an easy-to-use observability and continuously discovers, models, and visualizes the network automation tool to display various data and diagnosis on from edge-to-cloud in a single, consolidated view. This is the map, especially serves as single-pane-of-glass view of regardless of mix of infrastructure, delivery models, all data. Data View represents a data structure to organize vendors, or number of locations. Everything in your hybrid and visualize network information. network is accurately reflected in the NetBrain Digital Twin. Use NetBrain’s Data Views to: Displays network logical topologies, design pathways, • Access data from 3rd-party monitoring and observability baseline configurations, and changes made over time. See tools on a dynamic map to serve as the single pane of and understand the logical relationships between network glass for all your network data devices, their design intents, and compare changes over time. NetBrain’s Dynamic Map provides the network’s full • Visualize the entire network in a single map view by history while being highly adaptable for the future. dynamically overlaying data on top of a map Integrates with and leverages your software ecosystem. • Retrieve and display pre-defined live network data in Organizations rely on any number of data monitoring, map network change and configuration, ITSM, NPM and • Troubleshoot and correlate network issues and diagnose ITOM tools to ensure end-to-end network management. transient problems NetBrain integrates into all these solutions via API to provide a view of the end-to-end network that is enriched with contextual data. NetBrain’s Dynamic Maps provide a real-time visual digital representation of the edge-to-cloud network, across all network devices, platforms, and firmware versions. And this digital representation can be consumed by any other application, such as ITSM ticketing systems that may need topology information as part of their ticket management processes. The Digital twin always provides up-to-date digital documentation for any purpose, to solve problems or respond to outages, to speed audit preparation, or to support compliance mandates. And since the Digital Twin is real-time, it understands A/B pathing and follows devices hop-by-hop in both directions to mimic the actual path of a packet moving along the network, revealing the dependencies of applications and workflows across their environment.

The ultimate benefit – Scale At the end of the day, IBA is scaling what network operations teams already do - collect and analyze data,investigate and diagnose network problems, and monitor and validate that the network is achieving the outcomes it has been built to achieve. By decoding infrastructure complexities to measure and validate the inner workings of the network’s services, IBA sets networkoperations on a path to automation that scales for every IT person, every network (no matter what it’s made of), and every task (no matter how complex). SOLUTION BRIEF Network Mapping and the Digital Twin The system creates and checks how information flows Conclusion throughout the topology by establishing baselines and Today, it is not enough to just visualize the network during documenting paths and intents in their healthy states. In this Day-0 or Day-1 tasks. Every hybrid network requires way, it verifies the network’s ability to deliver the intended significant Day-2 efforts to assure that business service levels, assuring the health of the network and its applications continue to perform as needed 24x7 by hosted applications. their business leaders and software design architects. NetBrain creates the industry’s most robust Digital Twin Digital Twin, Dynamic Map and Traffic of the entire network, from edge to cloud, and allows Path are the Foundation for Problem that digital model to be manipulated by intents and Diagnosis Automation consumed by any number of management processes, including NetOps and ITSM ticketing workflows. And Part of the NetBrain system, the Digital Twin becomes the because the Digital Twin is created and maintained in perfect platform for network automation since it real-time, it is always accurate, quickly identifying current understands the detail of the underlying structure. And network conditions needed for any Day-2 investigation. since the network itself is defined by the intentions of what it delivers, the Digital Twin becomes a lens into the real-time operation of the network. With this tight connection between the two, network automation can be applied to the digital twin which is then reflected in the network components themselves. The Digital Twin enables extreme focus on Day-2 operations and can accelerate remediation of network issues. In addition, network automation can be applied proactively to enforce that the designer’s intentions are maintained. In doing so, IT teams can continually drive down the MTTR of network tickets, prevent outages from occurring in the first place, while continuously increasing the number of NetOps workflows that they can accommodate with existing resources. About NetBrain Technologies Founded in 2004, NetBrain is the market leader for NetOps automation, providing network operators and engineers with dynamic visibility across their hybrid networks and low-code/no-code automation for key tasks across IT workflows. Today, more than 2,500 of the world’s largest enterprises and managed service providers use NetBrain to automate network problem diagnosis, generate real-time documentation, accelerate troubleshooting, and enforce enterprise architectural rules. +1 (800) 605-7964 Copyright © 2023 NetBrain Technologies, Inc. All trademarks referenced herein belong to NetBrain Technologies, Inc [email protected] NB-SB-NMATDT-031423 www.netbraintech.com

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