Mist Systems Unveils AI-Driven Self-Driving Network for Enterprise

Mist Systems, a Juniper Networks company, announced the first AI-Driven Self-Driving Network for the enterprise, which leverages Mist’s AI engine and microservices cloud to streamline IT operations, simplify troubleshooting across wired/wireless domains and deliver optimized experiences to network users.

With the addition of these unique enhancements to Mist’s award-winning platform, Juniper continues to rapidly transform enterprise networks with automation and insights.

Wired Assurance Service, which brings automated operations and service levels to Juniper enterprise access switching customers via the Mist cloud.

Marvis Actions, a framework for self-driving networks, converts AI-driven insight into actionable tasks for proactive and streamlined IT operations.

Mist Wired Assurance Service

Mist is expanding its platform with a new cloud subscription service for Wired Assurance. This new feature brings robust data from Junos switch telemetry into the Mist microservices cloud and AI engine for simpler operations, shorter mean time to repair and better visibility into end-user experiences. With the following capabilities, Mist can further reduce the burden on IT professionals:

Customizable Service Level Expectations to measure wired user experience and pre-and post-connection performance metrics for IoT endpoints.

Anomaly detection so that administrators can be proactively alerted when there is a deviation in switch performance from baseline before users even know issues exist.

Marvis AI-driven Virtual Network Assistant, which has been expanded to cover both wired and wireless networks, enables IT administrators to ask natural language queries and get detailed answers for troubleshooting and insight. Sample wired assurance queries include, “What is wrong with my switch?"; “How was my network last Friday?”; and “How are my switch uplinks?”
Self-driving remediation identifies the root cause of wired and wireless problems and takes automated actions when possible, including the automatic addition of missing VLAN configurations and automatically correcting switch port misconfigurations.

New Marvis Actions Dashboard

The Marvis Actions dashboard, a new capability within Mist’s Marvis Virtual Network Assistant (VNA) Service, is a significant step towards Juniper’s vision of delivering intelligent self-driving networks. By leveraging Mist’s integrated AI-engine, Marvis, the Mist platform identifies the root cause of issues across various IT domains (WLAN, LAN, WAN and security) and automatically resolves them when possible. If the issue is outside the domain of the access network, Marvis will provide a set of recommended actions for IT to resolve the issue.

Marvis also delivers wired visibility for third party switches, proactively identifying issues, such as inactive/missing VLANs, firmware compliance, PoE budget constraints and insight into wireless users’ issues caused by wired problems.

“Our campus network and helpdesk staff are under constant pressure to handle the influx of new mobile and IoT devices, coupled with an increased demand for digital learning initiatives that require a reliable and pervasive wired and wireless experience. We are transforming our campus network to address these challenges with state-of-the-art Mist Wi-Fi 6 access points, Juniper QFX and EX switches, and a unified cloud and AI engine that delivers proactive and rapid troubleshooting, automated workflows, and deeper insight enabling better decision making,” said, Frank Feagans, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO, UT Dallas.

"The key to success in network operations today – as measured by reduced operating expense, enhanced staff productivity, reliable network performance, unified wired/wireless management that delivers configuration without conflict and optimal end-user quality of experience – is to integrate advances in management technologies that make all of this easy. Mist and Juniper have applied advanced AI, machine learning, automation and even natural-language capabilities to their scalable cloud-based platform, meaning that the self-driving network – long a challenging but essential goal – is finally here," explained, Craig Mathias, Principal with the Farpoint Group.

“Marvis Actions takes insight gleaned from our AI engine, such as the root cause of a problem, and turns it into actionable insight for IT managers. It is the first and ­– in some instances only – place our customers have to look to monitor and manage the health of their Mist network. This simplicity, intelligence and ease consistently makes Mist the platform of choice for top companies across the globe and sets us apart from the competition on the journey to AI-driven self-driving networks,” said, Sudheer Matta, Vice President of Product Management, Mist.

Marvis Actions is available today for Mist customers who have purchased the Marvis Virtual Network Assistant Service.