Juniper Networks today revealed Paragon Automation, a new brand and suite of software developed for vendor-agnostic monitoring of network services, automation, and resiliency testing.

The new portfolio combines internally developed tools and assurance testing software it gained through its Netrounds acquisition in September 2020. Paragon Automation now serves as the brand name for all of Juniper’s WAN automation products, and it targets the full operational lifecycle, Brendan Gibbs, VP of automated WAN solutions at Juniper, told SDxCentral.

“We’re on a mission to drive experience first networking,” something Juniper considers necessary for service providers and all WAN routed networks, including planning and design, configuration, service assurance and provisioning, and analytics for multi-vendor architecture in a visual workflow, he said. 

“Netrounds really brought us that focus on service quality assurance. We don’t want to anymore be in a world where no vendors provide boxes and service vendors cobble together networks upon them,” he said, adding that Paragon will be offered as both a software-as-a-service in public clouds or for deployments in private on-premises clouds. 

Juniper’s automation software and tools brought in house through the Netrounds acquisition have been rewritten to be microservice based and cloud delivered and hosted, Gibbs added. “Everything is Kubernetes based. We want to align to a standard hosting architecture for clouds, whether it be hosting in a public cloud or customers hosting this in their own private cloud on premise with their own Kubernetes-based architecture.”

5G networks and multicloud environments are a special focus for Paragon Automation because both architectures are significant drivers for automation, according to Gibbs. Tools of particular interest to those customers include transport network slicing, segment routing, and mobile service assurance, he said. 

Paragon eliminates manual tasks and processes for 5G operators and enterprises running on multicloud environments, according to the vendor. The software suite also includes tools for active testing, streaming telemetry, and machine learning based analytics with automated remediation.

The automation tools are currently supported by more than 45 vendors and the active assurance testing tools, which come from Netrounds, are vendor agnostic, Gibbs said. 

Most of the automated tools were already commercially from Juniper, but the expansion into assurance testing via Netrounds and repackaging of software to be microservices based and cloud native, is new and available to new customers or via upgrade to existing customers as they desire, Gibbs said.