Juniper tunes AI to find and fix SD-WAN, WAN routing problems

Juniper Networks continues to deliver on its overarching enterprise AI plans, this time adding features that will help customers proactively spot and fix WAN routing, SD-WAN and SASE problems. The enhancements are aimed at fortifying the vendor’s AI-Native Networking Platform, announced earlier this year, which brings Juniper’s wired, wireless data center, campus and branch networking products under one common management offering.

The AI-Native Networking Platform works by gathering telemetry and user state data from Juniper’s routers, switches, access points, firewalls, and applications to offer actionable insights and automated workflows for proactive issue detection and resolution. At the core of the platform is the firm’s cloud-based, natural-language Mist AI and Marvis virtual network assistant (VNA) technology, which can detect and describe countless network problems.

As part of the AI platform rollout, the vendor introduced Marvis Minis, which simulate end user, device, and application traffic to learn the network configuration and continuously feed data back into the Mist AI engine. The Minis software works by setting up a digital twin of a customer’s network environment to simulate and test user connections, validate network configurations, and find/detect problems without requiring any additional hardware, according to Juniper.

With today’s news, Juniper is now adding Minis support for a feature that lets customers run SD-WAN speed tests to verify link speeds and take proactive actions if problems are detected.

“Marvis Minis for SD-WAN adds and performs always-on, automated speed tests to ensure that the network is delivering as promised—even if users aren’t present,” wrote Jeff Aaron, vice president of product marketing, in a blog about the new features. “Now operators can resolve SD-WAN issues before users even connect.”

Additionally, another new feature called Dynamic Packet Capture is now available for SD-WAN. Dynamic Packet Capture automatically performs packet captures when error events occur, so operators have detailed visibility for troubleshooting. This eliminates the need to reproduce issues or track down needle-in-a-haystack problems, Aaron stated.

Also for SD-WAN customers, Application Routing Insights offer network operators a user-friendly visualization of the traffic traversing the SD-WAN, enabling them to identify bandwidth-intensive applications and ensure that all traffic is routed correctly, Aaron stated.

“These enhancements provide greater visibility into SD-WAN performance, reduce troubleshooting time for network operators, and enable reliable network performance,” Aaron stated.

Another new component, WAN Congestion service level expectations (SLE), lets IT teams watch for congestion problems. “The new congestion monitoring SLE informs operators of network interface utilization and alerts them if interfaces are being over-utilized and causing poor user experiences,” Aaron stated. 

Juniper is introducing a new security insights Mist dashboard within its Premium Analytics product to provide security event visibility and persona-based policy activation and threat responses. “This increased visibility provides actionable intelligence to security teams, enabling them to quickly identify incidents and respond to threats in real-time,” Aaron stated. “With integrated insights and an auditing dashboard, security and networking teams can work better together—simplifying workflows and improving efficiency and agility while reducing operating costs.”

Lastly, Juniper is bringing its Routing Assurance service under the Mist AI umbrella.

With Juniper Mist Routing Assurance, businesses can describe customizable service levels that let administrators monitor, analyze and resolve issues and anomalies identified by Mist AI swiftly across connected WAN Edge and peering locations for Juniper’s edge MX and ACX routing products, including MX204, MX 304 and ACX7024 models, Aaron stated.

“With Routing Assurance, customers can easily onboard routers and proactively detect and remediate routing issues before they impact performance and end-user experiences,” Aaron stated. “And the Marvis Virtual Network Assistant for routing transforms how network operators interact with the WAN by enabling faster documentation search, improved performance degradation troubleshooting, and recommended actions for remediation.”