Routing Director Overview

Service providers, cloud providers, and enterprises are facing an increase in the volume, velocity, and types of traffic. This creates both unique challenges (increased user expectations and expanded security threats) and fresh opportunities (new generation of 5G, IoT, distributed edge services) for network operators.

To accommodate rapid changes in traffic patterns, service providers and enterprises need to quickly detect and troubleshoot devices and service issues, and make changes to service configurations in real-time. Any misconfiguration due to human errors can lead to service outages. Investigating and resolving these issues can be a time-consuming process.

Juniper® Routing Director is a WAN automation solution that enables service provider and enterprise networks to meet these challenges. Juniper's solution delivers an experience-first and automation-driven network that provides a high-quality experience to network operators.

Routing Director is based on a modern microservices architecture with open APIs. Routing Director is designed with an easy to use UI that provides a superior operational and user experience. For example, Routing Director implements different persona profiles (such as network architect, network planner, field technician, and Network Operations Center [NOC] engineer) to enable operators to understand the different activities in the device life-cycle management (LCM) process. For details, see Personas Overview.

Routing Director takes a use case-based approach to network operations. When you execute a use case, Routing Director invokes all the required capabilities of that use case, runs a workflow (if necessary) and presents you with a completed set of tasks that implements the use case.

Routing Director supports the following use cases (explained at a high-level):

• Device life-cycle management (LCM)—Allows you to onboard, provision, and then manage a device. Routing Director automates the device onboarding experience, from shipment through service provisioning, thus enabling the device to be ready to accept production traffic. For more information, see Device Life-Cycle Management Overview.

• Observability—Allows you to visualize the network topology, provision tunnels, and monitor the devices and the network. You can also view the device and network health and drill down into the details. In addition, Routing Director notifies you about network issues using alerts, alarms, and events, which you can use to troubleshoot issues affecting your network. You to actively monitor the overall routing health in real time using the route explorer dashboard and the route topology map. For more information, see Observability Overview.

• Trust and compliance—Automatically checks whether the device complies with the rules defined in the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks document. In addition, Routing Director also checks the configuration, integrity, and performance of the device and then generates a trust score that determines the device's trustworthiness. For more information, see Trust and Compliance Overview.

• Service Orchestration—Enables you to streamline and optimize the delivery of network services and thereby improving efficiency and reducing the risk of errors. A service can be any point-to-point, point-to-multipoint or multipoint-to-multipoint connection. For example, Layer 3 VPNs or EVPNs. For more information, see Service Orchestration Overview.

• Active Assurance—Enables you to actively monitor and test the network's data plane by generating synthetic traffic using Test Agents. Test Agents are measurement points deployed in certain routers in your network. In addition, there are pre-deployed Test Agents in certain clouds, such as AWS. These Test Agents are capable of generating, receiving, and analyzing network traffic and therefore enables you to continuously view and monitor both real-time and aggregated result metrics. For more information, see Active Assurance Overview.

• Network Optimization—Enables you to optimize the utilization of network resources, enhance network performance, and ensure reliable and efficient delivery of data across the network. This is achieved by managing the life-cycle of Label-Switched Paths (LSPs), through an intent-based approach. For more information, see Network Optimization Overview.

• Network Planner—Provides in-depth network views and reports on how the network is performing in a particular failure scenario, all without impacting your production environment. For more information, see Planner Overview.

For details about these use cases and other features of Routing Director, refer to the corresponding sections in the Routing Director User Guide.