Juniper adds AI cloud services to its Apstra data center software

“App/Service Awareness lets customers see where their apps connect to the network and how they use network resources. It illuminates how network infrastructure supports specific application traffic. It’s like seeing which roads cars are taking to reach different neighborhoods,” Baker stated.

The Impact Analysis component utilizes details from App/Service Awareness to reduce the cognitive load on operators managing network anomalies, which is particularly valuable during high-stress events with many alerts and large impacts on applications. It turns big data into big knowledge, Baker stated.

“Impact Analysis solves the alert fatigue problem by pinpointing exactly which application is suffering from a particular network issue,” Baker wrote. It can tell the user which applications are affected by a specific anomaly in the fabric, for example, or it can identify which anomalies in the fabric are contributing to a particular application issue.

“If a port goes down, customers can now understand the blast radius of the event outage and know which services and apps might have problems,” Baker stated. “The result is resolving outages faster and developing more robust responses, or even preventing application outages from occurring in the first place.”

App/Service Awareness and Impact Analysis are just part of a menu of over 100 new features now available with Apstra 5.0.  Some of the other core new features include enhanced Ethernet VPN-Virtual Extensible (EVPN) analytics to make complex EVPN operations easier, and other analytics services aimed at helping customers manage intent-based networks.

“Juniper Apstra 5.0 also expands telemetry collection in important ways that will enable future AIOps applications,” Baker wrote. “And broader coverage of metrics related to switch health, optics performance, power supplies, fans, and temperature provide a more comprehensive data baseline that can enable future AI-Native predictive and proactive maintenance, so operators can replace components before they fail and impact application availability.”