Juniper Adds AI Cloud Services to Its Apstra Data Center Software

“App/Service Awareness allows customers to see where their apps are connecting to the network and how they’re using network resources. It illuminates how the network infrastructure is supporting specific app traffic. It’s like seeing which roads cars are taking to get to different neighborhoods,” Baker said.

The Impact Analysis component leverages App/Service Awareness details to reduce the cognitive burden on operators managing network anomalies, which is especially valuable during high-stress events with multiple alerts and high application impact. It turns big data into big knowledge, Baker said.

“Impact analysis solves the problem of alert fatigue by pinpointing exactly which application is suffering from a specific network issue,” Baker wrote. For example, it can tell a user which applications are affected by a specific framework anomaly, or it can identify which framework anomalies are contributing to a specific application problem.

“If a port goes down, customers can now understand the impact radius of the event and know which services and applications might be affected,” Baker said. “The result is faster failure resolution, more robust responses, and even preventing application failures.”

Application/service awareness and impact analytics are just part of the menu of over 100 new features now available in Apstra 5.0. Some of the other key new features include improved Ethernet VPN-Virtual Extensible (EVPN) analytics that simplify complex EVPN operations, as well as 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 metrics related to switch health, optics performance, power supplies, fans, and temperatures provide a more comprehensive database that can enable future predictive and proactive AI-Native maintenance, so operators can replace components before they fail and impact application availability.”