Juniper Networks Inc. today introduced new artificial intelligence tools that can automatically find issues in a company’s network to reduce connectivity issues for employees.

The headline item is Mist WAN Assurance. It’s an AI-infused service for troubleshooting problems in the wide-area network that powers a company’s long-distance connections, such as connections between remote workers’ homes and the corporate data center or between the data center and a public cloud platform.

Mist WAN Assurance lets administrators define the connection quality standards they want the network to meet. Then, its AI algorithms check that those standards are met and flag any anomalies.

The service detects issues by analyzing telemetry data from Juniper SRX firewall appliances that customers have running in their networks. It collects network-level details such as latency and packet loss to assess service levels. These measurements are mixed with application-level diagnostics details such as services’ bandwidth consumption into a unified dataset, which Mist WAN Assurance’s AI algorithms analyze to find potential issues. 

“You can monitor and enforce customizable service-level expectations for individual users, group users/devices or locations and leverage automated workflows to take appropriate actions when WAN SLEs are not being met,” Sudheer Matta, the vice president of products for Juniper’s Mist division, wrote in a blog post today.

Mist WAN Assurance delivers on a promise Juniper made last year after it acquired Mist, then an independent company, for $405 million. Mist’s AI troubleshooting software originally had a narrower focus on spotting issues in companies’ Wi-Fi infrastructure. Juniper said at the time of the deal that it would extend the technology to other segments of companies’ networks, a vision Mist WAN Assurance realizes.

Also new today is an upgraded version of Marvis, another technology Juniper obtained through Mist acquisition. Marvis is a natural-language diagnostics tool that enables administrators to type in a question such as “what’s wrong with the office router” and receive an answer. The tool, which was previously available as a search bar in a dashboard, is now also available as a conversational bot that administrators can interact with via a chat window. 

“No more hunting and pecking through UI dashboards. The Marvis conversational interface flips this approach upside down, allowing the IT administrator to simply type to the network in simple, efficient human speech,” Juniper’s Matta wrote.

Today’s product updates from Juniper add more momentum to a broader push in the networking industry to automate maintenance tasks with AI. Aruba, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s network equipment subsidiary, is also evolving its product portfolio in that direction. Aruba recently debuted an AI analytics platform several years in the making that can collect data from multiple parts of a company’s network to identify issues and provide troubleshooting tips. 

Photo: Juniper Networks