Juniper Networks has announced an advancement for private cloud data center operations, adding network, server and workload monitoring, analytics and troubleshooting with Contrail Insights.
Data center monitoring continues to increase in complexity as more infrastructure abstractions, services and software are stacked up to construct cloud-native applications. Juniper’s Contrail Insights provides historical and real-time visibility that cuts through layers of infrastructure to improve operational speed, experience and reliability.
Contrail Insights is the newest addition to the Contrail Enterprise Multicloud solution. From virtualized networking to microsegmentation, Contrail Enterprise Multicloud provides a complete software-defined networking solution for the multicloud era. Now the single pane of glass has fully integrated analytics. This provides a seamless user experience with deep insight and visibility into data center network overlay- underlay correlation and multi-tenant resource usage.
New Contrail Insights features and benefits include:
- Real-Time and Historic Visibility: Powered by machine learning-fed historical data and real-time streaming telemetry, Contrail Insights offers service-level and fine-grained observability for data center infrastructure, from overlay and underlay networks to physical and virtual servers and their workloads. The new data center topology heatmap is intuitive, configurable and allows operators to see the entire data center and then drill in to easily inspect localized issues.
- Troubleshooting Analysis: To find issues like hotspots, microbursts, monopolized resources and noisy neighbors in a multi-tenant or shared private cloud environment, Contrail Insights has a new top-N or “top talkers” query engine with tabular and charted views. Coupled with drill-down query filtering and a tie-in to topological path finding, these Contrail Insights diagnostics enable engineers to proactively mitigate issues like network congestion and resource contention.
- Overlay and Underlay Correlation: The overlay-underlay correlation and path finding features allow operators to uncover root cause by mapping virtual infrastructure for workloads and network abstractions down upon the physical infrastructure and network. In data center underlay physical networks, where overlay traffic is typically load balanced across the fabric, Contrail Insights path finding features illuminate the topology heatmap to quickly pinpoint problems during troubleshooting and solve formerly elusive issues.
AI-driven self-driving network for the enterprise
In other news, Mist Systems, a Juniper Networks company, announced the first AI-Driven Self-Driving Network for the enterprise, which leverages Mist’s AI engine and microservices cloud to streamline IT operations, simplify troubleshooting across wired/wireless domains and deliver optimized experiences to network users.
- Wired Assurance Service, which brings automated operations and service levels to Juniper enterprise access switching customers via the Mist cloud.
- Marvis Actions, a framework for self-driving networks, converts AI-driven insight into actionable tasks for proactive and streamlined IT operations.
Mist Wired Assurance Service
Mist is expanding its platform with a new cloud subscription service for Wired Assurance. This new feature brings robust data from Junos switch telemetry into the Mist microservices cloud and AI engine for simpler operations, shorter mean time to repair and better visibility into end-user experiences. With the following capabilities, Mist can further reduce the burden on IT professionals: - Customizable Service Level Expectations to measure wired user experience and pre-and post- connection performance metrics for IoT endpoints.
- Anomaly detection so that administrators can be proactively alerted when there is a deviation in switch performance from baseline before users even know issues exist.
- Marvis AI-driven Virtual Network Assistant, which has been expanded to cover both wired and wireless networks, enables IT administrators to ask natural language queries and get detailed answers for troubleshooting and insight. Sample wired assurance queries include, “What is wrong with my switch?"; “How was my network last Friday?”; and “How are my switch uplinks?”
- Self-driving remediation identifies the root cause of wired and wireless problems and takes automated actions when possible, including the automatic addition of missing VLAN configurations and automatically correcting switch port misconfigurations.
New Marvis Actions Dashboard
The Marvis Actions dashboard, a new capability within Mist’s Marvis Virtual Network Assistant (VNA) Service, is a significant step towards Juniper’s vision of delivering intelligent self-driving networks. By leveraging Mist’s integrated AI-engine, Marvis, the Mist platform identifies the root cause of issues across various IT domains (WLAN, LAN, WAN and security) and automatically resolves them when possible. If the issue is outside the domain of the access network, Marvis will provide a set of recommended actions for IT to resolve the issue.
Marvis also delivers wired visibility for third party switches, proactively identifying issues, such as inactive/missing VLANs, firmware compliance, PoE budget constraints and insight into wireless users’ issues caused by wired problems.
