Hybrid Network Visibility

Context-Aware Digital Twin

On-demand contextual model of your end-to-end hybrid network. The live, topology-aware model that every agent and automation acts on, and the foundation NetBrain opens up to the rest of your AI ecosystem through MCP. 

Gartner: “Through 2028, organizations using network digital twins as the central component of their network operations platform will reduce unplanned outages by 70%.” 

Inside the digital twin: the five sub-layers 

• Golden state and config: Captures your network’s golden configurations and states. Enforces compliance with industry standards and security protocols. 
• Flow: Live, baseline, and historical forwarding paths across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Calculated from real-time routing and forwarding tables, with control-plane modeling for SDN and SD-WAN. 
• Topology: Real-time topology and switching/routing detail across hybrid and multi-cloud networks. Underlay (Layer 2/3), overlay (VPN/MPLS/VXLAN), and virtual cloud paths. 
• Device: Configurations, resource utilization, software versions for every traditional, virtual, and cloud component from any vendor, captured in real time. 
• Inventory: Granular reports for every device. The One-IP Table acts as the single source of truth for IP, MAC, switch ports, and device-specific details. 

Network Auto-Discovery

Two paths to build the digital twin: Import Files or Discover. Either way, you end up with a live model covering device details, topology, and path analysis. The auto-discovery engine supports every mainstream network technology over API, CLI, and SNMP. Live data collection runs continuously across traditional and modern infrastructure. 

• Importing existing data: bootstrap from a dataset of config files and CLI. 
• Scanning the live network: five access modes (SNMP+Telnet, SNMP+SSH, SNMP+Telnet/SSH, SNMP+SSH/Telnet, SNMP only). 
• Verifying and exploring: global search across all config files, extend topology, drill into any device. 

Dynamic Map and Path

Discover and visualize the network architecture, configurations, and device relationships — no manual coding required. 

• Use maps to create assessment automation, troubleshoot interactively, and optimize workflows. 
• Generate A-to-B paths on demand within seconds. Each map adapts dynamically to the application. 
• Overlay diagnostic data with third-party API parser templates: CMDB, ITSM, Splunk, SolarWinds, ThousandEyes, Jira, ServiceNow, BMC — all visible together. 
• Compare live application paths to their intended golden saved paths. Detect every deviation. 
• View historical traffic paths and compare against current state to understand how network behavior has changed over time. 
• Simulate path changes before you make them — validate impact on a digital twin copy, not the live network. 

One-IP Table

A single source of truth for every IP, MAC, switch port, and device-specific detail in the context-aware digital twin. Through automated discovery and the visual parser engine, NetBrain builds and continuously refreshes the table: merging entries from multiple sources, keying on interface instance, and baselining against prior state so any change is immediately visible. 

The real-time IP-device mapping engine tracks every IP, maps it to its true L2/L3 gateway, and resolves cloud, load balancer, and endpoint IPs. 

• Incident response: automatically determines the L2/L3 devices for an IP during a service disruption. 
• AI-powered troubleshooting: Deep Diagnosis uses the One-IP Table to draw maps, trace paths, and launch diagnostics. 
• Change validation: locates every path and device an IP traverses or touches, for accurate change impact analysis. 
• Baseline comparison: flags any IP or MAC that has shifted gateway, port, or VLAN since the last discovery snapshot. 

SDN/SDx Network Operations

Software-defined networks are first-class citizens in NetBrain’s context-aware digital twin, not an afterthought. ACI, NSX, Cisco SD-WAN, Viptela, VeloCloud, and the broader SDx category are modeled with the same depth as traditional infrastructure — topology, path, configuration, intent, and change governance all apply. 

• Same Network Intent and Triple Defense governance framework applied to SDN policy and SD-WAN overlays. 
• ACI tenant, application, EPG, and contract topology visible alongside the physical underlay. 
• SD-WAN overlay paths modeled and validated against underlay reachability. 
• Assessment content for SDN/SDx environments expanding in GAL 26.12. 

Cloud & Kubernetes Support (Kubernetes aspects)

Kubernetes-native visibility integrated with cloud network operations. NetBrain models Kubernetes workloads, service meshes, and network policies, and shows them in the same topology as the cloud VPC or virtual network they sit on. 

• Discover and model Kubernetes objects: nodes, pods, services, ingresses, network policies, service meshes. 
• Trace traffic from the application through the cluster into the underlying cloud network. 
• Apply the same Network Intent and Triple Defense governance to Kubernetes network policy.