Juniper Networks enhances private cloud with Contrail Insights

Juniper Networks enhances private cloud with Contrail Insights

Juniper Networks has announced Contrail Insights, a new solution for managing private cloud data centers. According to the company, the solution should provide better monitoring, analysis and troubleshooting for networks, servers and associated workloads.

According to Juniper, data center security is becoming increasingly complex due to the combination of abstract infrastructure, services and software in cloud-native applications. Juniper’s Contrail Insights should provide insight into all layers of the infrastructure, using historical and real-time data. This should allow for faster management and improvements in the user experience and reliability of networks.

Contrail Insights is an addition to Contrail Enterprise Multicloud. This is a software-defined networking (SDN) solution for multi-client environments. New features of Contrail Insights include real-time and historical data visibility. Contrail Insights is also supported by machine learning, which provides historical data and real-time telemetry data. This data is used as input for enhanced security and to obtain detailed views of the data center infrastructure, from overlay and underlay networks to physical and virtual servers and the associated workloads.

Troubleshooting

Contrail Insights also offers troubleshooting solutions for signalling hotspots, microbursts, source monopolisation and ‘noisy neighbours’. Contrail Insights offers a new query engine for this. This generates a “top talkers” list of intensively used IT resources with table and graph views. In addition, there is a drill-down function, which makes it possible to filter queries and find the shortest network paths. These diagnostic capabilities enable users to solve problems such as network congestion and source provisioning more quickly.

Finally, there will be a link between overlay and underlay networks. This enables network administrators to find the actual cause of certain network problems. Mapping the virtual infrastructure for workloads and visualising network abstractions down to the level of the physical infrastructure, i.e. the hardware, should help with this.