Have you ever had a user report an issue such as “my WI-FI is slow” or have been sat at your desk sipping a cup of coffee for ages trying to troubleshoot a throughput issue between your Spine and Leaf switches, then if so Mist AI and Apstra by Juniper Networks is for you. Mist AI by Juniper is a machine learning and automation solution for enterprise networks that uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data science to optimise user experiences and simplify operations. The Mist Platform leverages AI-driven network operations to help you spend less time troubleshooting tasks such as bad cables, authentication failures due to clients typing in the wrong PSK for the SSID or a Vlan that has not been tagged on an interface. All these tasks carried out by network administrators like you and I take time which could be better spent looking at more important tasks such as designing a new Local Area Network for a customer which generates revenue for your business. Mist AI focuses on providing real-time insights into health of your network and how it is performing for its clients and to ensure that the causes of potential disruption are proactively located and resolved before they can escalate into a wider issue. The process of locating these issues and implementing a resolution is done in a matter of minutes, often before end users have even noticed an issue. Research carried out by Juniper shows that the Mist AI platform has managed to eliminate between 80 to 90% of ticket received by IT Teams. If you are like me, then nothing is better than having low ticket numbers as you clock off on a Friday! So, enough of the sales speech and more of what Mist can do for you, your network and your datacentre. Mist AI offers teams a virtual network assistant called Marvis which is a conversational and interactive bot that leverages the Mist AI engine to identify the root cause of issues across various domains (WLAN, LAN, WAN, Security) and automatically fixes these issues or recommends actions to be taken to resolve the issue. Imagine a situation where you have walked into the office on a Monday morning and a user has reported that the Staff SSID provides no internet access. With Mist AI and Marvis, you can logon to the Mist Dashboard, have Marvis tell you the root cause and have the issue resolved all before you have finished your morning coffee. Yes that’s right it’s not a dream but a reality with the help of Mist AI. Mist AI eliminates the need for a centralised on-premises controller, therefore removing another device to manage, maintain and monitor to ensure that wireless networks are available and perform to a high standard. All the access points connect to the Mist Cloud over a secure connection using HTTPS and Transport Layer Security which eliminates the need for complex internal infrastructure to allow access points that may be geographically disperse, the ability to communicate with a on-premises controller. With Mist AI, access points just need an internet connection and Mist Cloud will automatically provision and configure the access points in a matter of minutes. It is as simple as a few clicks on the dashboard, granting the access point access to the internet and waiting a few moments for the configuration to be pushed from the cloud. This efficiency will guarantee to reduce the time it takes to deploy wireless networking across your edge sites and in your headquarters. Juniper Apstra is a software based multi-vendor automation solution that aims to automate and validate the design and deployment across data centre networks. I work as a network support technician for an internet service provider (ISP) who support a wide variety of vendors and their products. This brings complexity of remembering multiple varieties of command line syntax and the nuances of each vendor in the way they carry out specific layer two and layer three functions. With Apstra, it cares less about the underlying hardware and more about the design and deployment and the ongoing maintenance of the data centre. A crucial function of Apstra is its ability to deploy configuration across multiple vendor’s hardware simultaneously through a single pane of management. For example, you might have a scenario where you have half of your data centre equipment being Cisco Nexus switches and the other half being juniper ACX’s. Apstra allows you to make changes in the management user interface such as adding a new virtual network and then it will generate the commands specific to both vendor operating systems and validate these changes before implementing them. Apstra allows your team to focus less of specialising in vendors and more on specialising in networking principles. As you and I both know, having sufficient rollback plans in place is crucial for any large-scale changes encase any unforeseen issues arise and there is always some hesitancy from customers about how they will recover if the work goes wrong. With Apstra’s change control functionality, it allows you to rollback changes in minutes to resolve these issues efficiently before suggesting causes for the issues that have occurred. You now have heard how Mist AI and Apstra can improve the efficiency and performance of your network and data centre, but now let’s put these together. Apstra combined with Marvis and the Mist AI platform provides teams the ability to have a high-level view of the network health of a datacentre using telemetry and flow data collected by Apstra and Mist AI. This collected data is analysed and processed by the AI Engine and Marvis suggests actions that need taking on your data centre switches, virtual infrastructure as well as the physical and logical connectivity of these devices. As you have heard above, Marvis will proactively locate issues in your data centre, which could have massive consequences if not resolved quickly , and present a fix. Apstra and Mist AI together means that if you wanted to make a change on a Friday evening and have no issues on Monday morning, then this is possible! I know that I have told you all the benefits of leveraging AI-Driven operations through Mist AI and Apstra, but the true power of these technologies comes to life when you see it in action and first how see how you can benefit from having your ticket queues reduced and your network pain points eliminated.