The NFD26 series of posts are my commentary from specific presentations held for Networking Field Day 26, a virtual event presented by Tech Field Day.
Before getting started, I want to put some high-level definitions on some terms used throughout this post.
- MistAI: Juniper’s cloud hosted platform that aggregates analytical data from a customer’s Juniper platforms (wireless, wired, SD-WAN, and data center) and presents it in forms that are meaningful and actionable.
- Marvis: Juniper’s virtual network assistant (VNA) that allows customers to have a guide to interact with their analytics hosted in the MistAI cloud. Marvis can also be leveraged to dynamically make proactive changes to the network if the need arises (if enabled by the customer, so that Skynet implications can be avoided!).
One of my takeaways from Juniper Network’s presentation at NFD 26 was their take on “Experience First Networking”. I took this as being Juniper’s stance that user experience is at the top of mind and that it is difficult to provide a solid user experience without visibility. Juniper is providing this visibility by crowdsourcing metrics data from across their platform line and aggregating it into the MistAI cloud for customers.
From MistAI, customers can see the health of their networks and clients by viewing the aggregated data from their Juniper platforms, in different catered formats.
When wanting to see monitoring analytics around root cause analysis, MistAI breaks it down into multiple service level metrics and attaches a percentage score to each metric. From there, you can drill down into a metric, to see it broken down into specific classifiers for the metric to get a better idea of issues happening in your network. For example, in the following image, root cause analysis data is being viewed based on the throughput service level metric. Once Throughput is selected, it is broken out into different classifiers with percentages attached to each based on the amount of time that specific classifier caused throughput related issues.
How exactly do customers get this valuable data from their Juniper platforms into MistAI and how is the different platform data aggregated, once in MistAI? I asked those questions and received responses from Juniper staff, depicted below.
Bert’s Brief
Day-to-day network operations and troubleshooting can definitely be difficult. A tough and sometimes tedious task is just the initial information gathering, then later on needing more info, having to get back in touch with the person reporting the problem, etc. It can get frustrating for everyone involved. Having as much information gathered for you at all times and presented in different formats that are meaningful and provide actionable data is incredibly valuable. One example is, instead of having to walk someone through finding their IP or MAC address, you could find all relevant data by just them knowing the hostname of their device (which is hopefully a sticker on the device in some cases). This can make things much easier. Juniper is calling this method Experience First Networking and accomplishes it by aggregating data being sent from a customer’s Juniper platforms and providing relevant data back to the customer.
Netication 