Arista ACE-S Automation (Foundations) key terms

Arista's network operating system, a Linux-based platform that runs on Arista switches and exposes standard programmatic interfaces such as eAPI, NETCONF, and gRPC alongside the CLI.

An Arista feature that lets management systems run EOS CLI commands and receive structured JSON or XML responses over HTTP or HTTPS, avoiding screen-scraping of text output.

The request and response encoding used by Arista eAPI, where each call names a method such as runCmds or get and carries parameters in a JSON object.

The eAPI method that executes a list of show or configuration commands on a switch and returns their output in structured format for programmatic consumption.

Arista's management and automation platform that collects state from EOS devices, provides a single pane for provisioning and change workflows, and hosts telemetry and analytics services.

The on-premises deployment model of CloudVision, installed as a cluster of virtual machines in the customer's environment and administered locally.

The Arista-hosted, subscription-based delivery of CloudVision in which the management plane runs in Arista's cloud while devices connect outbound over the internet.

The agent running on EOS devices that streams state, telemetry, and configuration data to CloudVision and accepts instructions back, forming the device-to-controller channel.

A CloudVision workflow that bundles proposed configuration changes into a reviewable unit, applies them to selected devices, and tracks approval, execution, and rollback.

A reusable block of EOS configuration text stored in CloudVision that can be attached to devices or containers and rendered with variables before being pushed.

A logical grouping of devices, subnets, or other containers in CloudVision used to scope configuration, tags, and policy to a set of network elements at once.

A CloudVision feature for writing configlets as scripts, typically in Python or Jinja2, so that configuration is generated dynamically from device or external data.

A label assigned to devices in CloudVision that can drive grouping, filtering, and automated assignment of configlets or compliance rules.

A CloudVision capability that compares each device's running configuration against the intended configuration and flags drift, missing lines, or unauthorized changes.

A boot process in which a new switch discovers the network, obtains an address, locates a bootstrap file or script, and applies initial configuration without manual console access.

The startup script or file a device retrieves during zero touch provisioning that supplies management addressing, controller details, and initial configuration commands.

The protocol commonly used during zero touch provisioning to give a new device an IP address and to point it at a bootstrap server through option 66 and option 67.

A standards-based protocol that uses XML-encoded remote procedure calls over SSH to read and edit configuration data on network devices in a structured, transactional way.

A data modeling language used to describe the structure, types, and constraints of configuration and state data that protocols such as NETCONF and gNMI carry.

A vendor-neutral set of YANG models for network device data, designed so the same paths and structures work across different hardware and software platforms.

A gRPC-based protocol for retrieving, setting, and subscribing to device state using modeled paths, widely used for streaming telemetry and configuration on EOS.

A high-performance remote procedure call framework using HTTP/2 and protocol buffers that underpins gNMI and many modern network automation interfaces.

A compact binary serialization format used by gRPC to encode structured messages, defined in schema files and more efficient on the wire than text formats.

The internal EOS database that holds configuration and operational state, which eAPI, NETCONF, and telemetry paths ultimately read from or write to.

An EOS feature that triggers CLI commands or scripts when specified system events occur, such as an interface going down or a route being added.

A push model in which devices periodically or on change send structured state data to collectors, replacing frequent polling of individual devices.

A registration that tells a device which data paths to report, at what interval, and under which conditions, so collectors receive only the needed metrics.

The modeled location, such as an OpenConfig or EOS path, that identifies a specific piece of device state to include in a telemetry subscription.

An open-source gNMI client and collector used to subscribe to device telemetry, export it to outputs such as Prometheus or Kafka, and troubleshoot gNMI interactions.

An open-source time-series database and monitoring system that scrapes or receives metrics and supports alerting rules and query language for network observability.

A visualization tool that queries data sources such as Prometheus and renders dashboards and alerts, commonly paired with telemetry pipelines for network monitoring.

A long-standing polling protocol for reading device counters and traps, still used for monitoring but less granular and less efficient than modern streaming telemetry.

A logging protocol that sends event messages from network devices to a central server for storage, searching, and alerting on operational problems.

A packet-sampling technology that sends summarized traffic flow information to a collector for traffic analysis and capacity planning without capturing full packets.

An agentless automation framework that runs playbooks of YAML tasks over SSH or API connections, often used to push configuration or gather facts from EOS devices.

A general-purpose programming language widely used for network automation, with libraries for HTTP, SSH, gRPC, and parsing that interact with Arista devices and CloudVision.

A templating engine that renders text with variables, loops, and conditionals, frequently used to generate device configuration from structured data during automation.

An HTTP-based architectural style using resources and standard verbs such as GET and POST, the basis for many network controller and CloudVision APIs.

The property that running the same automation task repeatedly produces the same end state without unintended side effects, a core design goal of declarative tooling.