Juniper today announced a pair of updates to its Mist AI portfolio and Marvis artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) platform aimed at simplifying EVPN-VXLAN deployments and diagnosing WiFi and SD-WAN disruptions.

“Juniper is really doubling down on this experience-first networking as our true north,” Juniper VP of Marketing Jeff Aaron told SDxCentral. This comes down to “how do we optimize both operator and user experiences.”

Juniper’s latest step is to make deploying EVPN-VXLAN fabrics an easier and less “clunky” experience. For those that aren't familiar, the technology acts as a network overlay that operates on top of an existing physical network infrastructure.

“When you talk about EVPN-VXLAN fabric management, it’s something that’s absolutely needed in the campus and branch, in addition to the data center … and since Mist is our primary solution there, it just made perfect sense to take all what we’re already doing … and add this to it,” Aaron said.

While EVPN-VXLAN isn’t new, it traditionally has been a time-consuming and manual process, he explained. “Cisco has been doing this forever, but it’s just really, really clunky; very hard to do EVPN-VXLAN. So what we did was move it into the Mist Fabric Manager.”

The Mist Fabric Manage platform gains support for the technology, allowing customers to choose a topology that fits their needs, define networks of interest, identify required physical connections, and apply the appropriate policies from the Mist dashboard.

If this sounds familiar, it's because the underlying technology is borrowed from Apstra’s intent-based networking (IBN) framework, which Juniper acquired late last year.

According to Aaron, making EVPN-VXLAN easier to manage and deploy is particularly relevant as the number of mobile and IoT clients that network administrators need to support soars.

“We had a hospital a year ago that had maybe a dozen IoT devices. Now, it’s like 300 types of devices,” Aaron said. “EVPN-VXLAN is becoming a key driver here.”

Juniper also announced a spate of new Marvis Actions designed to help customers identify hard-to-spot problems like failing wireless clients, coverage holes, and WAN disruptions.

Marvis is Juniper’s AIOps digital assistant, and Marvis Actions is a dashboard interface that provides proactive insights into the state of the network. The platform can identify common problems like misconfigured VLANs, offline devices, non-compliant software, and other network failures.

The latest update allows customers to more accurately determine whether a connectivity problem is the result of a failing wireless client, or if it’s a coverage issue.

“Coverage holes are really hard to detect,” Aaron said, describing a large retailer in the U.S. “If there’s a hole, the associate probably isn’t going to create a trouble ticket … they're just going to move somewhere else.”

Similarly, the technology can identify whether disruptions are occurring on the LAN or WAN. “It’s very difficult to diagnose layer-1 problems. No one ever has a bad cable problem,” Aaron said, adding that Marvis’ goal is to identify and in some cases remediate network disruptions anywhere in the network from client to the cloud.