Introduction

NVIDIA ® NEO ® is a powerful platform for managing scale-out computing networks. NEO enables data center operators to efficiently provision, monitor and operate the modern data center fabric.

NEO serves as interface to the fabric, thereby extending existing tool capabilities into monitoring and provisioning the data center network. NEO uses an extensive set of REST APIs to allow access to fabric-related data and provisioning activities.

NEO eliminates the complexity of fabric management. It automates the configuration of devices, provides deep visibility into traffic and health, and provides early detection of errors and failures.

NEO presents the following benefits:

  • Reduces complexity of fabric management

  • Provides in-depth visibility into traffic and health information

  • Network API supports integration, automation, and SDN programmable fabrics

  • Historical health and performance graphs

  • Generates preventive maintenance and “soft degradation” alerts

  • Quickly troubleshoots topology and connectivity issues

  • Integrates and streamlines fabric information for your IT systems

  • Combined with MCare, produces regular event notifications to the NOC for 24/7 health monitoring

Central Management Console

NEO provides network and device management functions via one central console. Its centralized dashboard can be used to monitor, troubleshoot, configure and optimize the system via a single interface.

In-Depth Visibility and Control

NEO includes an advanced granular monitoring engine that provides real-time access to switches, enabling cluster-wide health and performance monitoring, real-time identification of problems and failures, and quick problem resolution via granular threshold-based alerts and its utilization dashboard.

Quick Resolution of Problems

NEO provides comprehensive information from switches, showing errors and traffic issues such as congestion. The information is presented concisely over a unified dashboard and configurable monitoring sessions. The monitored data can be correlated per job and customer, and threshold-based alarms can be set.

Open Architecture

NEO provides an advanced REST interface and SDK package integrated with external management tools. This combination enables data center administrators to consolidate management dashboards while flawlessly sharing information among the various management applications, synchronizing overall resource scheduling, and simplifying provisioning and administration.

NEO as Network API

NEO serves as an interface to the fabric, thereby extending existing tool capabilities into monitoring and provisioning the data center network. NEO uses an extensive set of REST APIs to allow access to fabric-related data and provisioning activities.

The interface can provide external tools with the fabric topology, device health and performance status, alerts, and device and fabric management actions. This allows taking advantage of existing tools and enhancing them, as well as building new DevOps oriented management frameworks.

For further information on NEO API documentation, please refer to the NEO SDK User Manual.

NEO architecture includes controller and service providers (Device Manager, Provisioning, Fabric Manager, Monitoring and Access Credentials Manager). The controller transfers information from the service providers to the user, as well as controls the service providers and verifies their status. It queries and fetches information from providers and performs operations such as:

  • Storing a list of supported logs per each provider

  • Pausing, resuming, resetting, and fetching a specific log

  • Maintaining a connection with a provider

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NEO Graphical User Interface

The NEO Web GUI is the front-end of the application. It communicates with the NEO REST API in order to retrieve and display the relevant information.

NEO Controller

The NEO controller is the central component enabling data collection from all the service providers. The collected data is maintained in a central repository. The controller exposes a Restful API that allows retrieving any type of information and running any type of supported actions.

NEO Providers

The NEO providers listed below are the data sources for the controller. Each provider is an independent process (service) which communicates with the controller.

  • Device Management Provider

  • Provisioning Provider

  • Monitoring Provider

  • Access Credentials Provider

  • IP Discovery Provider

  • Telemetry Provider

  • Ethernet Connectivity (LLDP) Discovery Provider

  • IB Provider

  • Solution Provider

  • Virtualization Provider

  • Host Manager Provider

  • Performance Provider

NEO utilizes the following communication protocols.

Protocol

Purpose

HTTPS

Collecting chassis data regarding NVIDIA devices and Windows servers

SNMP

Collecting connectivity data, monitoring data and general data from switches

SSH

Switch/Linux provisioning

© Copyright 2023, NVIDIA. Last updated on Nov 16, 2023.