Juniper Networks acquired assurance testing vendor Netrounds for an undisclosed sum. Juniper plans to wrap Netrounds into its WAN portfolio and enable service providers to ensure end-user experiences.

The Netrounds platform is a vendor-agnostic monitoring service that aims to ensure network services are working as intended. The platform can be used to test 5G network slicing, to assess the effect of new systems before they go live, or to locate and remediate performance issues on an SD-WAN.

"Imagine being able to simulate a large-scale 5G [radio access network] before you actually deployed it. Or figuring out whether your new cloud service really needed edge compute to achieve low latency goals. Maybe there’s a glitch in your video, SD-WAN, or internet service and you want to pinpoint and resolve the issue before irate customers started flooding your help desk and Twitter feed," wrote Brendan Gibbs, VP of automated WAN solutions at Juniper Networks, in a blog post.

Gibbs wrote that the internet is filled with problems that are easily solved if you only know where to look. He compared modern networking to a machine that has broken down, but with a single hammer blow in the right spot fires back up. The only problem, he writes, is the network is made up of not one machine but thousands.

That's where Netrounds comes in, Gibbs writes. Netrounds' technology "bridges that missing link between services and networks, providing assurance about the quality of service experience from a customer perspective, with insight to where problems originated when things go wrong."

Knowing where to find the problem is essential to ensuring customer experiences at a time when expectations are higher than ever, said Manoj Leelanivas, CPO at Juniper Networks, in a statement.

"Service providers are increasingly looking to differentiate themselves by looking beyond offering basic connectivity and focusing on the quality assurance of their services,” he said, adding that the integration of Netrounds will help to automate that process at scale, giving Juniper an advantage over competing vendors.

Mats Nordlund, CEO of Netrounds, added in a statement that these capabilities will only become more critical as technologies like 5G, Kubernetes, SD-WAN, and hybrid cloud see broader adoption.

The proposed acquisition is expected to close by year-end.