Paragon Automation 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® Paragon Automation 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.

Paragon Automation is based on a modern microservices architecture with open APIs. Paragon Automation is designed with an easy to use UI that provides a superior operational and user experience. For example, Paragon Automation 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.

Paragon Automation takes a use case-based approach to network operations. When you execute a use case, Paragon Automation 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.

Paragon Automation 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. Paragon Automation automates the device onboarding experience, from shipment through service provisioning, thus enabling the device to be ready to accept production traffic.

• Observability—Allows you to visualize the network topology, and monitor the devices and the network. You can also view the device and network health and drill down into the details. In addition, Paragon Automation notifies you about network issues using alerts, alarms, and events, which you can use to troubleshoot issues affecting your network.

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

• 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.

• 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 details about these use cases and other features of Paragon Automation, refer to the corresponding sections in the Paragon Automation User Guide.