Data center networks are an increasingly critical foundation of enterprise IT, but networking groups still tend to operate in silos, separate from the rest of the IT organization. Network administrators often find themselves caught between the demands of end users, the IT and application environment, and the practical realities of network management.
Juniper Networks continues to drive significant innovation in this space to stay ahead of customer needs in the rapidly evolving data center market. Last month, we released Juniper Apstra Cloud Services, a new suite of cloud-based, AI-Native applications for the data center, as well the latest release of Juniper Apstra: version 5.0.
Today, we’re unveiling the Juniper Apstra ServiceNow PowerPack to further simplify network management and operations through tighter integration with ServiceNow®, a worldwide leading enterprise IT management platform. This new capability transforms how organizations manage network incidents, empowering networking teams to work more efficiently and collaboratively with the rest of the IT organization—and it’s available for free with any Juniper Apstra license and easily installed from GitHub.
The total elapsed time to get something done in an IT organization is typically driven by teams waiting for other teams to finish their job, rather than the actual work to be performed. Automation of processes is useful. It saves time. It reduces the amount of toil that network engineers can be subjected to. But the real gains arise when automation moves beyond narrow task efficiency and helps different departments align, eliminating days or weeks from organizational inaction.
Connecting networking teams with the larger IT organization
While Juniper Apstra’s anomalies and probe features excel at identifying network issues, visibility has previously been limited to NetOps teams. This gap leads to inefficiencies, with network professionals spending valuable time on manual bookkeeping and data correlation instead of focusing on critical network management tasks and strategic projects. Now, operators can get back to doing what they want to do, rather than what they have to do.
The diverse array of customer environments, systems, and business logic requirements presents significant additional hurdles. Each organization has unique needs, making a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of organizational communication impractical and less effective.
To address these challenges, Juniper has developed an innovative Apstra PowerPack that integrates Apstra’s advanced monitoring capabilities with ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a popular IT service management platform that helps organizations automate, optimize, and modernize work across their enterprise and ecosystem. Organizations use ServiceNow and similar robust ticketing systems to track trouble tickets, workflows, actions, and issues throughout the IT life cycle. This PowerPack solution leverages Juniper Apstra’s comprehensive REST API to create a customizable, automated bridge between network anomalies and organizational processes with ServiceNow.
The Juniper Apstra ServiceNow PowerPack synchronizes Apstra monitoring with ticketing system updates in near real time. When Juniper Apstra detects anomalies, the software automatically opens incident tickets in ServiceNow, populates them with relevant information, and resolves them once the issues are addressed in Juniper Apstra.
Enhance visibility and control over data center incidents across the organization
Creating and updating trouble tickets in response to network issues is a laborious, manual process. Operators need a way to automate the process that ensures seamless integration with relevant teams. Connecting Juniper Apstra’s anomaly detection with ServiceNow does just that, streamlining network operations, automating incident management, and boosting efficiency.
The PowerPack uses Juniper Apstra as a central control point. Values in a property set are used to indicate the network blueprints that need to be tracked and to pause the automation. The PowerPack logic also uses property sets to keep a record of the tickets created and currently active.
With the Juniper Apstra ServiceNow PowerPack, you’ll be able to:
- Enhance visibility and control over data center incidents across the organization: Extend network issue awareness beyond the network team, fostering better cross-departmental communication. This increased efficiency frees up network administrators to focus on critical tasks by automating tedious manual processes.
- Streamline incident management by automatically creating and updating tickets based on Apstra-identified anomalies: Generate ServiceNow tickets instantly, ensuring rapid response to network issues. Real-time synchronization maintains up-to-date ticket status, reflecting the current state of network anomalies.
- Adapt it to your specific business requirements: Leverage Juniper Apstra’s advanced design and operation capabilities to customize the integration to your unique business logic and requirements using Juniper Apstra’s flexible API.
- Download it now: It’s free with any Juniper Apstra license and downloadable on GitHub.
Transforming how organizations manage incidents
This solution embodies our commitment to delivering creative solutions in network management. To get the Juniper Apstra ServiceNow PowerPack and see how it can benefit your organization, visit our GitHub repository. New versions and implementations are continuously updated and added. And to learn more about how Juniper Apstra can revolutionize the way you design, deploy, and operate your data center infrastructure click here.
