For years, the networking industry is dominated by Cisco and its operation system, IOS. IOS, IMHO, is not designed to be customized by the users. Configuration, monitoring, and O&M should be done manually lines by lines on Cisco IOS.
Revolution has occurred in the networking operating system. Disruptive switches like Arista and bare-metal switches that run Linux-based OS, not only easily leveraged SDN-based controller such as OpenFlow, but also provided users ways to build custom applications on the operating system. We can also create containerization & virtualization of any services. For example, in this scenario, we can put a container atop switch kernel for pre-processing logs, event, and alarm data in the switch (e.g., using python & R) and a container to transfer to big data storages (e.g., Flume to transfer logs to HDFS). We can also automate the deployment/redeployment using Chef/Vagrant/Ansible. By doing so, a lot of manual overheads could be avoided and bandwidth could be allocated based on priority.