Apstra Cloud Services Datasheet

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Modern business applications are typically composed of collections of loosely coupled microservices where each service can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. Understanding exactly how each application/service maps across the fabric and how the services are communicating can be a tedious task. App/Service Awareness, in conjunction with Apstra, provides a visual representation of application and service data, simplifies the tasks of implementing and managing services, and puts the information you need right at your fingertips.

Combining and enriching existing network monitoring protocols, such as sFlow, NetFlow, IPFIX, and IFA with Apstra’s rich graph data knowledge, gives you a comprehensive view of the network. You can directly query the relationships between network and service data and gain insights that would be tough to find or infer from traditional databases or from jumping between tables. App/Service Awareness gives you a deeper understanding of the business‑critical systems with logical and physical topology awareness. 

App/Service Awareness adds data to the Apstra network knowledge graph to provide:

• Visibility where services attach and access the network
• Visual understanding of “service to resource” mapping
• Knowledge of how services communicate
• Resource usage consumed by each service

The information allows you to understand exactly which services would be impacted by a port or link going down or experiencing performance degradation. This is critical in planning to ensure appropriate service performance and resiliency. Combined with the Impact Analysis feature, it also helps to quickly determine the root cause of service issues, eliminating noise and reducing mean time to resolution.

When problems occur in the data center fabric, it often results in a flood of alerts. Sorting through them and running additional queries manually to understand impact, prioritize, troubleshoot, and pinpoint the problem is time consuming at the worst possible time: when your services are down and your business productivity is in jeopardy. With Impact Analysis, you no longer have to worry about this. It queries the graph database, monitors flow data, and maps network conditions to application/service issues across relationships, allowing you to quickly understand how anomalies are impacting other parts of the business.

Impact Analysis takes advantage of AI and ML models to revolutionize the troubleshooting experience with:

• Reduced alert fatigue: By mapping conditions and impacts, Impact Analysis coalesces information and helps you distinguish which anomalies are related to the problem and which are side effects or unrelated. This allows you to focus on the critical issues without being overwhelmed by irrelevant alerts
• Clear picture of issues and impacts: Impact Analysis provides a comprehensive view of the problems affecting your applications. You'll have a better understanding of the issues and their impacts so you can prioritize and resolve them more efficiently
• ML for anomaly analysis: Using ML algorithms, Impact Analysis analyzes data from the graph database, raw telemetry, and network sources to map conditions and their impacts. This process further minimizes speculation in the troubleshooting process
• Compare states between different times: Impact Analysis allows you to compare the state of your resources at different times. This feature helps you identify trends, patterns, and potential bottlenecks that might be affecting your applications' performance
• Quicker recovery: With a clearer understanding of the issues and their impacts, you can quickly address problems and get your applications up and running in no time

Apstra Cloud Services includes support for user‑defined dashboards that provide insights into metrics of interest, including inventory and resource usage. Operators who have multiple data centers managed by Apstra (for example, across different geographies or organizations) can see a global view of all networks or filter the view to specific sites.

Users can select from among a range of dashboard widgets to display:

• Top talkers
• Cluster health and versions
• Top devices by port count
• Top anomalies
• Inventory: devices and virtual networks
• Port activity
• Summary overview: total numbers of sites, devices, services and anomalies
• Apstra geographic locations
• Apstra versions
• Site summary details
• Site comparisons

Since Apstra is inherently multivendor, working with both Juniper and many third‑party switching devices, Apstra Cloud Services inherit those multivendor properties, enabling the same visibility of services, data center network health, anomaly detection, impact analysis, and recommended actions, regardless of which switching vendors are deployed.

ACS is cloud‑based while Apstra is premises‑based. Connectivity between the two applications is enabled over a secure WebSocket connection that supports REST API requests, responses, and the streaming of telemetry data and alerts.

Apstra Cloud Services are included with Apstra depending on the licensing tier.

Juniper Networks believes that connectivity is not the same as experiencing a great connection. Juniper's AI-Native Networking Platform is built from the ground up to leverage AI to deliver exceptional, highly secure, and sustainable user experiences from the edge to the data center and cloud. Additional information can be found at juniper.net or connect with Juniper on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook.

1000796 - 001 - EN SEPTEMBER 2024