Juniper today unveiled Contrail Insights, a network monitoring, and analytics, troubleshooting platform that the vendor says addresses growing complexity within private cloud data centers.

The latest addition to the Contrail Enterprise Multicloud suite, Juniper claims Contrail Insights will provide customers with historical and real-time visibility, thus giving them greater insight into the data center and helping them to mitigate congestion and uncover the root cause.

According to James Kelly, director of product marketing at Juniper, Contrail Insights will compete against data center operations suites including VMware's NSX, Cisco ACI, Arista CloudVision.

"VMware NSX and related products do some of this for the VMware stack, but critically don’t deal with the underlay," he wrote in an email. "Other products like Cisco DCNM, Cisco ACI, or Arista CloudVision are related to [data center] networking ops, but really only ACI and NSX are close to being what we’d consider SDN."

Contrail Insights seeks to make this complexity more manageable by giving enterprises greater visibility of their networks.

Juniper hopes to achieve this goal by integrating three core features into Contrail Insights: real-time and historical data, troubleshooting analysis, and overlay and underlay correlation. The company says these features will allow operators to use machine learning to see the entire data center and identify localized issues, mitigate network congestion and resource contention, and allow them to map virtual infrastructure to uncover the root causes of these problems.

Contrail Insight's overlay and underlay correlation features, in particular, are exactly what customers are looking for, Kelly said.

According to Alan Weckel, founder and technology analyst at 650 Group, who was cited in the release, visibility, and telemetry have become the key to managing network complexity as enterprises move to automate their data centers.

Juniper is showcasing Contrail Insights this week at the NXTWORK event in Las Vegas.

"We are excited to offer customers a comprehensive contrail solution with the addition of Contrail Insights," said Bikash Koley, chief technology officer at Juniper Networks, in a statement. "Cloud frameworks within data centers have provided tremendous infrastructure automation, but also bring about added operational complexity."

Contrail Insights plays into a recent artificial intelligence (AI) push by Juniper following its acquisition of Mist for $405 million earlier this year. In pursuit of this mission, the company today also rolled out Mist's AI engine across wired and wireless networks.

Juniper claims its AI technology will allow customers to use AI and automation to troubleshoot and self-correct problems as they crop up on the network.