Juniper Networks advances customers' private cloud data centers

Juniper Networks has announced a new advancement for customers' private cloud data center operations, adding network, server and workload monitoring, as well as analytics and troubleshooting.

The advancement comes in the form of Contrail Insights, which is Juniper Networks' newest addition to the Contrail Enterprise Multicloud solution.

According to Juniper Networks, data center monitoring continues to increase in complexity as more infrastructure abstractions, services and software are stacked up to construct cloud-native applications.

Contrail Insights is designed to provide historical and real-time visibility that cuts through layers of infrastructure to improve operational speed, experience and reliability.

Juniper Networks states that Contrail Enterprise Multicloud provides a complete software-defined networking solution for the multicloud era. Now the single pane of glass has fully integrated analytics.

This provides a seamless user experience with deep insight and visibility into data center network overlay-underlay correlation and multi-tenant resource usage.

650 Group founder and technology analyst Alan Weckel says that enterprises are looking to automate their data centers and gain insights from their networks, which means visibility and telemetry are key to supporting a data center network that is reliable.

"With Contrail Insights, Juniper is building off the momentum of Contrail Enterprise Multicloud to provide real-time telemetry and analytics across the data center network in a single pane of glass for improved network reliability and user experience.

Juniper Networks chief technology officer Bikash Koley adds, "We are excited to offer customers a comprehensive Contrail solution with the addition of Contrail Insights.

"Cloud frameworks within data centers have provided tremendous infrastructure automation, but also bring about added operational complexity. We have designed Contrail Insights to bring visibility to troubleshooting and analytics issues faced today with powerful tools for discovery and analysis through all layers of the network.

New Contrail Insights features include:

- Real-Time and Historic Visibility: Powered by machine learning-fed historical data and real-time streaming telemetry, Contrail Insights offers service-level and fine-grained observability for -data center infrastructure, from overlay and underlay networks to physical and virtual servers and their workloads. The new data center topology heatmap is intuitive, configurable and allows operators to see the entire data center and then drill in to easily inspect localized issues.

- Troubleshooting Analysis: To find issues like hotspots, microbursts, monopolized resources and noisy neighbors in a multi-tenant or shared private cloud environment, Contrail Insights has a new top-N or "top talkers" query engine with tabular and charted views. Coupled with drill-down query filtering and a tie-in to topological path finding, these Contrail Insights diagnostics enable engineers to proactively mitigate issues like network congestion and resource contention.

- Overlay and Underlay Correlation: The overlay-underlay correlation and path finding features allow operators to uncover root cause by mapping virtual infrastructure for workloads and network abstractions down upon the physical infrastructure and network.

In data center underlay physical networks, where overlay traffic is typically load balanced across the fabric, Contrail Insights path finding features illuminate the topology heatmap to quickly pinpoint problems during troubleshooting and solve formerly elusive issues.