Juniper's Junos network operating system (NOS) is the latest in its extensive portfolio to get the artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) treatment. Juniper Support Insights promises to improve network visibility and provide actionable insights into the state of the network.

The service targets some of the vendor’s largest customers and competes with rival AIOps services from Cisco, Arista Networks, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Aruba. 

“One of the biggest challenges IT and network operations teams face is having the right level of visibility into [the] operational health of the network,” Juniper Networks COO Manoj Leelanivas said in an email to SDxCentral. “Juniper Support Insights provides holistic operational health insights along with proactive intelligence to optimize enterprise, service provider, and cloud provider networks.”

The service pools telemetry data from across the network, including from routers, switches, security appliances, the data center, and the core network, he added. This data includes network inventory, device state, and software version. Once collected, this information is correlated against Juniper’s knowledge base to deliver insights to customers.

“Through current and historic network views, IT operations teams can compare network health data across different time periods,” Leelanivas said.

The service also promises to simplify the onboarding of devices into the company's cloud management portal. Devices running the Junos NOS, including its ACX, EX, PTX, and QFX series appliances are supported.

The capability addresses operational and support requirements of Juniper's largest customers, Leelanivas explained. “Customers who have an active Juniper Care support contract can opt in for the solution. They just need to select their method of data collection: either direct to cloud or via a lightweight collector.”

Neither method requires additional configuration. “With the lightweight collector, Juniper ships an appliance that is pre-configured and fully managed to the customer,” he added.

According to Juniper, the service supports up to 20,000 network devices and are secured using a zero-residual footprint architecture and ephemeral computing to mitigate data leaks.

Using this data, Juniper automatically generates reports and recommendations based on network health metrics and hardware and software inventories.

“The information from these dashboards and reports will enable customers to take remedial or preventative action on their network devices,” Leelanivas wrote. “This elevates the customer support experience through reduced risk of issues and problems, streamlined operational planning, device data correlated with Juniper specific knowledge, improved inventory management, and reduced troubleshooting effort and time.”

Juniper is far from the first vendor to integrate AIOps functionality into its network stack. Leelanivas named Cisco’s SMARTnet service, Smart Assist Service, Business Critical Services, CX Cloud, as well as Arista's CloudVision and Aruba’s Edge Services platform as competitors.

Juniper Support Insights is available starting in early 2022.

Alongside the Junos update, Juniper announced two new WiFi 6E access points (APs) to its MIST portfolio. The tri-band APs expand beyond the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands into the 6 GHz range to offer higher bandwidth.

With the release, Juniper also integrated Zebra Edge Insights into its Marvis AI assistant and the Juniper Mist cloud to optimize device roaming and voice-over-IP performance.

Juniper acquired Mist for $405 million in early 2019. While the company started out as a wireless LAN vendor, Mist's AI functionality won Juniper over and now is the beating heart behind the company's AI-driven enterprise strategy.

Finally, Juniper introduced IoT Assurance in a bid to streamline the onboarding and security of IoT devices without network access control.