Fortinet announced enhanced AIOps capabilities across its networking portfolio, including artificial intelligence-based network operations management for 5G and LTE gateways. 

The expanded FortiAIOps provides configuration recommendations for hardware and software, and offers resolution to trouble tickets.

Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, named a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN, also now has FortiAIOps capabilities including the ability to track metrics such as interfaces, system resources, and ISP bandwidth, as well as compute SLA baselines.

“Customers are heavily investing into modern networking technologies,” Nirav Shah, VP of products at Fortinet, told SDxCentral. “So as they are focusing on enabling the digital transformation and making the user experience consistent for working from anywhere, they want to make sure that they don't spend too much time on day two operations.”

FortiAIOps has supported the Fortinet Wired/Wireless LAN portfolio, and the addition of AIOps capabilities to support 5G/LTE gateways expands visibility and allows analysis of data down to the WAN link level, not just at the SD-WAN abstraction level. 

Fortinet claims the addition of AIOps capabilities to support FortiExtender 5G/LTE gateways makes it the only vendor providing AIOps on a 5G/LTE link.  

Fortinet said network operations center teams are becoming increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence-based management tools like AIOps to “maximize network visibility, improve the response time to anomalies and reduce ticket volume to remediate potential network issues.”

The vendor started building its AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities a decade ago, according to Shah. “The most important part for AI and ML is to have an infrastructure in place,” he said. 

With over 6 million sensors deployed globally, FortiGuard Labs can process over 100 billion security events per day, Shah noted. He explained Fortinet decided to leverage that infrastructure for networking, first implementing AIOps for wired and wireless, and now extending those capabilities to SD-WAN and 5G offerings. 

“There are vendors who can do really good AIOps for LAN, but they can't do it for WAN. Or some can do only for LAN and WAN, but not for 5G,” Shah said. “And that's why we are really fortunate that infrastructure has been there.”

Shah added the No.1 purpose for AI- or ML-based technologies is to simplify customer's operations.

“That's the promise all of the vendors, all the technologies provide,” he said. “But at the end of the day, if customers are able to reduce their trouble tickets by a significant amount, and they can focus on the big picture of digital transformation, that's where the AIOps should be helping.”