Juniper Paragon Active Assurance Datasheet

The Control Center remotely controls Paragon Active Assurance software-based and traffic-generating Test Agents, which provide distributed measurement metrics for service activation testing, quality monitoring, and troubleshooting. It also displays detailed, real-time results and statistics actively measured by the Test Agents and reflector streams across multiple applications, services, and interfaces. Test Agent capabilities include service activation (Y.1564, MEF 48), network performance (UDP, TCP, Y.1731, TWAMP, path trace), Internet performance (HTTP, DNS), rich media (IPTV,OTT video, Netflix, VoIP telephony, and SIP), as well as support for controlling Wi-Fi interfaces, and performing remote packet inspection.

Test Agents may be placed in strategic locations across your network for continuous quality monitoring. They may also be installed on demand for more temporary purposes, such as activation testing of newly deployed services. Test Agents are available in several formats: as software to be run as a virtual machine on a hypervisor, as a container application, or as a software appliance for installation on dedicated x86 hardware. 

Paragon Active Assurance calculates and visualizes errored seconds (ES) and SLA compliance indicators. Aggregated result views show large numbers of distributed active measurements. Measured data can be presented down to 1 second resolution, with an historical timespan adjustable from the last 15 minutes to years in the past.

SLA compliance is presented for each quality monitoring scenario and periodic test in comprehensive and configurable reports. These reports can be scheduled and e-mailed to stakeholders at custom intervals, or they can be retrieved programmatically through the Control Center’s API. Alarms with multiple severity levels (critical, major, minor, warning) can be sent as SNMP traps.

Test Agents automatically discover and register Control Center login servers. Test Agents appear as resources in the inventory once launched by the NFV orchestrator or OSS, or connected physically to the network.

Test Agents can be tagged for simple grouping and structuring. Test Agent interfaces can be configured remotely from the Control Center.

The Paragon Active Assurance Web GUI has an intuitive test sequence builder which can be used in the service design process. SLA compliance thresholds can be set for each monitoring scenario.

Test building blocks can be saved as reusable templates, where parameters can be left to be defined at runtime. Tests and monitoring sessions can be triggered by the OSS through APIs.

Test and monitoring scenarios and templates, active Test Agents, and all test results and reports obtained can be freely shared among users in the same multitenant Control Center. Also, unique URLs can be shared to external users, with or without password protection enabled.

Paragon Active Assurance offers the following benefits: 

• Integrated, dynamic solution for full multilayer, multidomain service life-cycle management—Combined service activation testing, quality monitoring, and troubleshooting provide fully orchestrated assurance. 
• Virtualized and cloud-ready—Flexible deployment and elastic scaling on all major modern virtualization platforms allows you to start small and scale. 
• Easy to get started—Software-only and hosted components allow for smooth introduction, enable immediate use, and bring instant value. 
• Automation through well-documented complete API—Simple integration of fulfillment and assurance workflows eliminates manual work and reduces cost of complex integration. 

The Control Center is either hosted by Juniper Networks and offered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution or deployed on premises in a private cloud. In either case, it displays both second-by-second and aggregated real-time results, as well as KPIs and SLA monitoring metrics. 

The Control Center has a wide range of built-in core features that are exposed over either an intuitive Web portal user interface or a complete read/write API. The Web portal is used for test design, on-demand initiation of tests, remote troubleshooting, and real-time reconfiguration of service assurance scenarios and thresholds. The API is used by external systems such as OSS and NFV orchestrators to dynamically launch new Test Agents and initiate activation tests and quality monitoring scenarios.

The Control Center can be made available in two ways—hosted in the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure or installed on premises or as a private cloud solution. Both deployment options share the same core features, Web portal, and API. 

Test Agents actively generate authentic traffic and analyze detailed, real-time measurements across multiple applications, services, and interfaces. Test Agent capabilities include measurement of network performance (UDP, TCP, Y.1731, TWAMP), IPTV and over-the-top (OTT) video, including Netflix stream speed tests, and Internet (HTTP, Ping, HTML5 Performance Tests), as well as VoIP and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) telephony, mobile radio, Wi-Fi, and remote packet inspection.

In addition to deploying the Test Agent for TWAMP reflection based testing of multivendor devices, specifically for Junos devices, the Test Agent can also collect TWAMP session results from measurements done by the Juniper Routers using the NETCONF protocol to evaluate errored second thresholds and report back to the Control Center on SLA adherence based on delay, jitter, loss and other performance metrics.

All Test Agents are controlled and updated remotely through the Control Center. The Control Center in turn can be accessed through a Web GUI or through a cloud API.

External OSS and NFV orchestrators easily automate distributed activation tests and quality monitoring through a feature-rich cloud API to the Control Center. Network operations staff access the user-friendly Web interface as a test design environment, as well as for on-demand tests, quality monitoring, and real-time visualizations. 

Hosted: The Control Center is hosted in the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure and managed by Juniper Networks. This solution scales transparently and elastically with the number of Test Agents deployed; there is no need for any involvement from you as a Juniper Networks customer. The server software and the repository of Test Agent software are always kept up to date. 

On Premises: The Control Center is deployed on premises in your own data center environment, either on bare-metal servers or on existing private cloud infrastructure, and is managed either by your organization or by Juniper Networks as a managed service. The option of deploying a TimeScaleDB for direct queries from an external dashboard is available.

Please contact your Juniper Networks sales representative for ordering information. 

At Juniper Networks, we are dedicated to dramatically simplifying network operations and driving superior experiences for end-users. Our solutions deliver industry-leading insight, automation, security, and assurance to drive real business results. We believe that powering connections will bring us closer together while empowering us all to solve the world’s greatest challenges of well-being, sustainability, and equality. 

1000684 - 005 - EN JULY 2023