Juniper Networks’ Mist platform is gaining AI-based management and observability upgrades aimed at streamlining the way customers remediate network problems.
Specifically, Juniper has extended the capabilities of its Mist AI Marvis Minis to improve WAN and cloud monitoring. A new dashboard lets customers see application performance issues more quickly, and a new client offering improves network automation.
Marvis Minis are a key part of Juniper’s Mist AI networking platform and Marvis virtual network assistant (VNA). The cloud-based, natural-language platform can detect and describe a wide range of network issues, including persistently failing wired or wireless clients, bad cables, access-point coverage issues, and problematic WAN links.
Marvis Minis work by setting up a digital twin of a customer’s network environment to simulate and test user connections, validate network configurations, and find/detect problems without requiring any additional hardware, according to Juniper. Minis simulate end user, device, and application traffic to learn the network configuration and proactively determine network issues. Data from Minis is continuously fed back into the Mist AI engine, providing an additional source of insight for AIOps responses, according to Juniper.
With this upgrade, the Marvis Minis can better simulate user connections. They can proactively validate wired and wireless network and application experiences, allowing preemptive problem detection and resolution before users are impacted, according to a blog about the news written by Steve Tufts, vice president of customer service at Juniper.
Another new feature extends digital twinning across the global WAN, widening support for public and private cloud environments and applications, according to Tufts.
“Unlike traditional solutions for digital twinning and synthetic testing, Marvis Minis don’t require manual configuration or any additional hardware or software. They are digital experience twins, now client-to-cloud available on all Juniper full-stack devices,” according to a data sheet from Juniper. “Marvis Minis are always on and constantly ingesting user traffic data. The Marvis AI Assistant automatically triggers Marvis Minis based on events, such as a network configuration change, and also runs Marvis Minis on a consistent basis. When put into action for a network service or application failure, Marvis Minis can quickly validate the failure and determine the blast radius. When widespread issues occur, Marvis Minis highlight Marvis Actions immediately, enabling your team to find and fix issues faster and more reliably.”
For the overarching Marvis platform, a new Marvis Actions dashboard lets customers see and control automated decisions made by the Marvis AI Assistant. It also provides a history of all proactive actions, whether fully self-driving or assisted, along with insights into how Marvis identified and resolved each issue, Juniper stated.
Lastly, available for Wi-Fi-connected Android, Windows, and MacOS devices, new Marvis client software can understand how any connected device sees the Wi‑Fi environment and view its properties, such as device type, OS, radio hardware, and radio firmware versions. By focusing on the client’s viewpoint, Marvis Client fills a visibility gap, offering insights into how individual devices interact with the Wi‑Fi environment, Juniper stated.
These insights are complemented by data collected from Juniper access points, routers, switches and firewalls, so IT teams can proactively address performance issues and improve troubleshooting without the need for additional software or hardware sensors, Juniper stated.
Source:: Network World