Understanding Juniper Mist Wired Assurance
Lionel Dartnall, Business Unit Lead Collaboration & Networking at Westcon-Comstor Southern Africa
Juniper Mist Wired Assurance brings cloud management and Mist AI, which uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data science techniques, to campus fabrics. It is designed to improve network management by moving a campus deployment toward AI-driven operations. In turn, this brings better experiences to connected devices.
The Wired Assurance value proposition forms part of the Juniper Mist Cloud, which streamlines deployment and management of a campus fabric. For its part, Mist AI simplifies operations and improves visibility into the performance of connected devices. Think of Wired Assurance as something that assists IT teams in reducing mean time to repair (MTTR) and delivers a new generation of experience-first networking. EX Series switches combined with Mist AI offer insights into switch health and wired pre- and post-connection service-level metrics.
Consultative approach
Juniper consultants with extensive deployment knowledge about EX Series switches and Juniper Mist Wired Assurance work closely with customers to assess and define features specific to their environment. Using industry best practices, consultants will configure EX Series switches deployed through Juniper Mist Cloud Services, define a migration plan, and provide knowledge transfer of the solution and deployment.
As part of this Solution Workshop, a Juniper consultant discusses the requirements, including identifying circuits, applications, security level, wired and wireless network status, and SLE planning. When it comes to the Design and Architecture Review, a consultant creates a proposal outlining the best design and implementation. In the Configuration Creation, the consultant configures the Juniper Session Smart Routing or Juniper Networks SRX Series Firewalls based on a solution that will support the best performance from Juniper WAN Assurance. During the Knowledge Transfer Workshop, Juniper provides a consultant-style workshop for the customer where implementation details are discussed, and the Juniper Mist WAN Assurance interface, is explained.
Custom-first
Juniper Mist Wired Assurance is designed to assist customers in transitioning from traditional network management to AI-driven operations. At its core, this is an enablement service that helps provision, configure, and manage Juniper switches.
Wired service level expectations. Pre- and post-connection performance metrics provide insight into network throughput, the number of successful connects, and switch health. Customers will understand precisely how their wired network is performing, so there is no more guesswork as to the quality of experience that users, wired devices, and IoT endpoints have.
AI-driven Switch insights. This provides insights into how wired switches perform across a timeline with detailed device-level metrics, such as CPU and memory utilisation and Virtual Chassis status. At the port level, customers will see the number of bytes transferred, traffic utilisation levels, and power draw.
Switch health metrics. Customers can now ensure optimal switch operations with key health metrics such as firmware compliance, missing VLANs, and switch-access point (AP) affinity in multivendor environments, when paired with Juniper wireless APs.
Open APIs. Wired Assurance provides the ability to harness the power of 100% open and programmable APIs to fully automate the switch activation, onboarding, and configuration process. Users can integrate with third-party systems like ServiceNow and Splunk, which support APIs for automated ticketing, troubleshooting, and more.
All about the experience
Juniper Mist Wired Assurance delivers a better-wired experience, starting with onboarding to provisioning to the day-to-day management of Juniper EX Switches. Users get greatly simplified, simpler operations, can streamline their troubleshooting, and have better visibility into connected devices with AI-powered automation and service levels.
Having access to AI-driven insights means the organisation can provide world-class services to all users. In fact, user experience has become the new uptime. Today, it is the single most important metric for measuring a successful IT infrastructure. But tracking that metric can be challenging. Just because a network is passing traffic does not mean users are having positive experiences. And even if support tickets are not increasing in volume, companies cannot assume users are satisfied with the performance and reliability of the IT infrastructure.
This is why Juniper Mist Wired Assurance is such a game-changing solution. It uses AI to bridge the gaps between the network, applications, security, and devices to put the spotlight back on user experiences and look beyond just the bits and bytes of network traffic flow.