HPE ups ante in self-driving net ops with enhanced Mist agentic AI

Virtually all companies regard networks as critical to business success, but as they become more distributed and complex than ever, operations teams are needing tools that speed resolution, boost efficiency and ensure user experience at scale. Looking to address these needs, HPE has made what it says are major innovations to its HPE Juniper Networking portfolio to deliver agentic AIOps through more autonomous, intelligent and proactive network operations.

The advances will be made through enhancements in the artificial intelligence (AI)-native Juniper Mist platform. This includes agentic AI-powered troubleshooting, expanded visibility and control of self-driving actions, a generalised large experience model (LEM) and AIOps features for datacentres. These moves are designed to reduce IT complexity and assure “exceptional” user experiences from client to cloud.

“Today’s networks must do more than connect – they must understand, adapt and act,” said HPE Networking executive vice-president, president and general manager Rami Rahim. “With these new digital experience twin and agentic AI capabilities in Juniper Mist, we continue to turn the network into a proactive partner for IT, capable of solving problems before they impact users. This is a major leap toward truly self-driving operations, helping our customers simplify complexity, reduce costs and deliver exceptional digital experiences at scale.”

The Mist enhancements will be driven by improvements to Marvis, the AI engine that powers the platform. Specifically, these will be grouped around four key areas: enhanced conversational capabilities; expanded self-driving actions; generalised LEM; and AI for datacentre operations.

Marvis AI analyses telemetry across the wired, wireless, WAN and datacentre domains, and creates automated workflows to simplify operations and lower costs. AI-driven support uses trouble ticket data to continually train and increase the efficacy of the Marvis AI engine, and a fully application programming interface-driven model works with external systems and applications, like Zoom, Teams and ServiceNow, to quickly identify and fix the root cause of problems.

The Marvis AI assistant will now have augmented conversational capabilities that facilitate real-time troubleshooting. By using an agentic AI framework, HPE says customised insight is provided with self-driving agents that collaborate across the wired, wireless, WAN, client and application domains. A Marvis Actions dashboard will support the autonomous remediation of more network issues, including misconfigured ports, capacity issues and non-compliant hardware – with full IT oversight.

The LEM is an AI model that is said to be unique to HPE Juniper Networking, analysing billions of data points from applications like Zoom and Teams to troubleshoot the performance of common collaboration tools and predict future issues. Enhanced with Marvis Minis – twins that simulate user experiences – LEM can now predict future application experiences without real-time data from the applications themselves. This is fed into the Marvis AI engine where self-driving actions can be taken to optimise future performance, prior to users even being present.

Within datacentre operations, the Marvis AI Assistant for Data Centre integrates with Apstra’s contextual graph database to deliver intelligent insights and lay the groundwork for autonomous service provisioning. Marvis Minis also extends to the datacentre for continuous service validation and application assurance pertinent to datacentre networks.

These capabilities are also seen as bolstering GreenLake Intelligence, HPE’s next approach to autonomous IT and agentic AIOps, which deploys specialised AI agents in a multi-layered IT architecture. This is designed to enable real-time problem-solving, proactive optimisation and smarter decision-making across networking, storage and compute. 

HPE believes the agentic AI capabilities in Juniper Mist shift IT from reactive to proactive management, laying the groundwork for significant improvements in performance and efficiency.

“Operations teams need tools that speed resolution, boost efficiency and ensure user experience at scale,” said Bob Laliberte, principal analyst at The Cube Research.

“For over a decade, HPE Juniper Networking solutions have pioneered the use of AI in network operations, accelerating the journey toward self-driving networks. With its latest advances in agentic AI and GenAI, powered by Marvis, HPE is delivering real autonomous capabilities that enable predictive intervention, letting ops resolve issues before users even notice.”