Unlocking Deep Network Observability: Lessons from the Field

When Visibility Fails: A Real-World Crisis

After a mid-market infrastructure upgrade, Integrated IT (a managed service provider) faced a major outage with no clear root cause. Vendors pointed fingers. Logs were incomplete. Visibility was thin.

Using Aviz—specifically the Open Packet Broker (OPB) and Aviz Service Nodes (ASN)—the team ruled out false leads and pinpointed the true failure. Lightweight agents embedded in switches kept collecting telemetry even during the outage; once links returned, historical data streamed in to provide the needed X-ray view.

“The product is excellent—but it’s the people behind it that made the difference. With Aviz, we moved from a dysfunctional vendor relationship to one that’s transparent and proactive.”

— Frank Vincentelli, CTO, Integrated IT

Why Openness Matters: A Partner’s View

Source Code—a global systems integrator approaching $1B in revenue—builds both edge and cloud-scale infrastructure. Field CTO Joel Winland highlighted why they align with Aviz: an open, flexible software partner that honors customer choice.

With full SONiC support, Aviz lets teams pick the hardware, NOS, and deployment model that fits their architecture. No lock-in. No black boxes. Just choice and control.

Inside the Stack: End-to-End Observability

The Aviz platform brings three tightly integrated components together:

• Open Packet Broker (OPB): White-box traffic management fabric for filtering, replication, aggregation, slicing, labeling, and tunneling. Supports granular L2–L4 filtering, 5G GTP header parsing, and symmetric load-balancing.
• Aviz Service Nodes (ASN): x86 software appliances for deep packet inspection, metadata extraction, KPI generation, application identification, and deduplication. Works across telco (4G/5G) and enterprise, providing application and per-user/session visibility while removing redundant traffic.
• Network Copilot (NCP): An on-prem, AI-powered assistant built on open-source LLMs. Natural-language queries against verified telemetry with RAG to keep answers precise—privacy-safe and hallucination-resistant.

Everything is orchestrated via Flow Vision—a unified UI (single pane of glass) for traffic flows, rules, tunnels, and health across OPB and ASN nodes.

Where It Shines: Demonstrated Use Cases

• Telco observability: GTP-C/U correlation at scale, per-user/session KPIs, and 5G SA/NSA analytics.
• Application visibility: Dashboards for bandwidth, OS/device profiling, geo data, and threat detection.
• Data-center deduplication: 90%+ traffic reduction from TAPs before tools—preserving compute and reducing false positives.
• Natural-language queries: Ask “Which apps are most used by 5G users?” and get traceable answers via NCP.

Built to Scale

Hardware-agnostic and SONiC-ready: OPB supports Broadcom (Trident, Tomahawk) and NVIDIA Spectrum (1/2/3). 400G is in production today; 800G+ is in active qualification—so your observability scales with your network.

Conclusion: Visibility Isn’t a Luxury—It’s a Lifeline

Operating without full network visibility is operating at risk. Aviz delivers a scalable, AI-integrated observability stack that helps NetOps teams detect earlier, resolve faster, and run confidently across multivendor fabrics.