Juniper Data Center Assurance Overview

Obtaining real-time visibility into the functioning of the data center is critical to providing an unmatched user experience. It is important that administrators have the ability to resolve data center events and anomalies proactively, in the same way as administrators resolve campus network events using Mist.

For this, administrators should have visibility into the operations of the data center in real-time. Juniper Data Center Assurance (DC Assurance) is a SaaS-based Day 2 observability platform for data centers that are managed using Apstra Data Center Director. The DC Assurance application, which can receive, process, and perform root cause analysis of network events from a data center managed by Apstra Data Center Director, enables network administrators to proactively respond to data center events ensuring that users' application experience remains unaffected.

Juniper Data Center Assurance runs as an independent application in the cloud, receiving and analyzing events information from Apstra. You can also integrate Juniper Data Center Assurance with Mist. When integrated with Mist, you can view the total number of data center events in the Data Center/Application category in Marvis Actions along with other event types for the campus and branch networks. You can then access Juniper Data Center Assurance and view more detailed information about those data center events in Marvis Actions by clicking the Data Center Actions event type under Data Center/Application. This way, network administrators get complete visibility into the operations of the entire enterprise network, comprising the campus, branch, and data center networks. Administrators can resolve network issues proactively, which in turn enables enterprises to improve operational efficiency and reduce operational cost and downtime.

Juniper Data Center Assurance supports the following features:

• Application Awareness—Provides visibility into application performance by visualizing the services that are active during a given time period. The visualization also shows how the data center fabric is being utilized by these services. You can select a service and drill down to get detailed information about the traffic flow. For more information, see Application Awareness Overview.

• Impact Analysis—Provides a graphical representation of the network infrastructure along with the path that the service traffic takes. The network topology provides information about how nodes in the data center are connected to the clients, how application traffic is handled, and how an anomaly in a node can impact application traffic. This enables faster resolution of network issues that impact end user experience. For more information, see Impact Analysis Overview.

• Predictive Analytics—An ML-based feature that analyzes historical data points, predicts future metrics, and recognizes outliers in the forecasted data. The insights from this information helps the network admin prevent potential anomalies, device failures, and optical interface failures in the network. For more information, see Predictions Overview.

• Sustainability Insights—Provides real‑time visibility into power consumption, GHG emissions, and associated operational costs of the data center network. It forecasts power requirements, GHG emissions, and power costs, which support sustainability reporting. The recommendations for shutting down unused or underutilized components without impacting traffic help conserve power and reduce emissions. The site-level energy dashboard helps you quickly understand the site’s energy profile and identify devices with power anomalies. The sustainability feature thus helps improve operational efficiency and supports sustainability goals of the organization. For more information, see Sustainability Overview.

• Service Level Expectations—Sets a benchmark for the performance of a data center network. SLEs help network administrators understand whether the network is performing optimally and enable them to respond proactively to network events or performance issues. For more information, see Service Level Expectations Overview.

• DC Hub—Provides a comprehensive platform for the network administrators to discover, install, and manage add-ons in your Apstra environment. These add-ons act as plug-and-play options to add functionality and analytics within Apstra for your specific requirements. For more information, see DC Hub Overview.

• Marvis Actions—Utilizes the AIOps capability of Marvis AI Assistant for Data Center to analyze data center events and displays them in the Marvis Actions dashboard. Marvis Actions provides recommended actions that enable administrators to proactively respond to data center events. For more information, see Marvis AI Assistant for Data Center.

• Marvis AI Assistant—Enables administrators to quickly search within product documentation for relevant troubleshooting information to resolve the events. Marvis AI Assistant for Data Center also provides a conversational interface, which administrators can use to ask queries in natural language and get relevant responses. With the help of Marvis AI Assistant, you can also try to resolve issues, reduce the need to create support tickets, and accelerate the time to resolution. You also have the option to provide feedback on your experience with the AI-assisted issue resolution process. For more information, see Marvis AI Assistant Overview.