Juniper Routing Assurance

Welcome to Juniper Routing Assurance Lab

This lab is designed to provide hands-on experience with Juniper’s AI-driven Routing Assurance platform. You’ll begin with a brief overview of the solution, followed by a guided walkthrough of the user interface. Through practical exercises, you’ll explore key features and learn how to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize network routing with real-time insights and automation.

Whether you’re looking to enhance routing reliability, reduce operational overhead, or improve end-user experience, this lab will equip you with the foundational skills to get started.

Overview

Juniper Routing Assurance (JRA) is an AI-driven, cloud-based observability platform that seamlessly integrates Mist AI with Juniper’s routing infrastructure. Purpose-built to enhance network visibility, automate operations, and proactively manage the WAN edge, JRA leverages powerful AIOps capabilities to deliver real-time, actionable insights.

By simplifying troubleshooting, accelerating root cause analysis, and minimizing manual intervention, JRA helps reduce operational overhead and downtime. The result is improved network performance, enhanced reliability, and a better user experience—all from a single intuitive interface.

Lab Objectives:

In this hands-on lab, participants will:

  • Router Onboarding and Built-In Tools

    • As the Administrator of your enterprise network infrastructure, you’ll learn how to effortlessly onboard routers into the Juniper Routing Assurance (JRA) platform, enabling AI-driven observability from day one.

    • As part of the onboarding process, you’ll configure routers using the intuitive Remote Shell and leverage built-in tools like Ping and Traceroute to swiftly diagnose and resolve connectivity issues.

    • Set up real-time router alerts to stay informed about outages or anomalies as they occur.

    • Dive into the Router Insights dashboard for deep visibility into device health and performance, and utilize Service Level Expectation (SLE) metrics to proactively manage and optimize your network before problems impact end users.

  • Network Failure Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

    • In this scenario, you’ll explore how to leverage Juniper Mist Routing Assurance (JRA) and its Router Insights to efficiently investigate and resolve network faults.

    • The goal is to quickly identify root causes, assess impacted services, and reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) through AI-driven analytics and an intuitive user interface.

As the Administrator of an enterprise network, you’ve received reports of intermittent WAN connectivity issues. The instability is observed on the WAN interface that serves as the primary link between your router and the Provider Edge (PE) router.

Symptoms include:

  • Periodic link flaps

  • BGP neighbor session resets

  • Application performance degradation

These disruptions may stem from various causes, such as:

  • Faulty physical cabling or optics

  • Interface configuration mismatches

  • CRC/input errors or excessive retransmissions

Using JRA, you can visualize real-time and historical performance data, correlate events across timelines, and isolate the root cause—all without manually parsing CLI outputs. This empowers faster troubleshooting, effective collaboration with the service provider, and ultimately, a more resilient and high-performing network.

  • Compliance Assessment and Audit Readiness

    • As the Administrator of an enterprise network, you are responsible for ensuring both compliance and operational stability across your infrastructure.

    • The Juniper Mist Routing Assurance (JRA) platform empowers you to achieve this through its AI-driven insights and intuitive user interface.

Using JRA, you can seamlessly perform compliance assessments by auditing router configurations, OS versions, software advisories, and lifecycle states (EOL/EOS). The platform flags non-compliant devices, enabling proactive remediation well before audits occur. This ensures your network remains secure, standards-compliant, and audit-ready at all times.

This data can be compiled into a detailed report and shared with the Service Provider, expediting resolution and reducing downtime.

Starting Lab

This lab allows 1 person per Sandbox. If you would like to do this lab raise your hand to get Lab User information.

Lab Blueprint Topology

Let us have a look at the physical topology with devices and links.

Lab Diagram

Topology Explanation

The lab environment consists of four Juniper vMX routers and a pre-configured Juniper Routing Assurance (JRA) platform. The JRA platform includes an existing Organization and Site configuration.

  • Routers in the Topology:

    • vMX-R1: Enterprise Branch WAN Router (initial configuration only)

    • vMX-R2: Enterprise Branch WAN Router

    • vMX-R3: Enterprise Branch WAN Router

    • vMX-R4: Enterprise WAN Core Router

The edge router (vMX-R4) is included in the topology solely to simulate WAN interface link issues for testing purposes.

  • BGP Configuration:

    • eBGP is configured between:

      • vMX-R2 and vMX-R4

      • vMX-R3 and vMX-R4

vMX-R1 has not yet been fully configured and will be the primary focus for the configuration and onboarding tasks in the lab.

Devices Connections

Branch

Interface

IP Address

ISP

IP Address (vMX-R4)

vMX-R1

ge-0/0/0

10.10.1.2/24

ge-0/0/0

10.10.1.1/24

vMX-R2

ge-0/0/0

10.10.2.2/24

ge-0/0/1

10.10.2.1/24

vMX-R3

ge-0/0/0

10.10.3.2/24

ge-0/0/2

10.10.3.1/24

Routing Assurance Login

Note: Access details will be provided to users upon arrival at the Hands-On Lab (HOL) area.

  1. Open Chrome and navigate to https://routing.ai.juniper.net/, you should see the login page to Juniper Routing Assurance GUI.

  2. Login using your Lab User credentials

  • Username - Use Username Provided

  • Password - Use Password Provided

  1. Once logged in, user will see the following page.

UI Navigation

We have already onboarded some of the routers and assigned them to a site for you to play around.

  • Monitor section provides information about router Alerts and Service Level Expectations

  • Routers section shows information about all the routers onboarded on JRA

  • Organization section provides various options like:

    • Administrators - to manage users’ access

    • Site Configuration - to create / manage sites

Router Onboarding and Built-In Tools

Router Onboarding

  1. Navigate to Routers section, then click on Inventory > Adopt Routers

  1. Click Copy to Clipboard option to copy the CLI commands, and then paste them into the router’s command-line interface to apply the configuration

  1. Enter configuration (edit) mode, paste the copied commands into the CLI, and then commit the changes to apply the configuration

  1. After applying the changes, navigate to Inventory page. The router will appear in the Unassigned state.

  1. Now lets assign the router to a Site

  2. Select the Unassigned router, then click on More > Assign to Site

  1. Select the Site to which the Router needs to be added, in this case it’s Site: India

  2. Click on Assign to Site

  1. A pop-up will appear confirming: 1 Routers assigned.

.

  1. Navigate to the Inventory page, the new device will now show as Connected

Router Configuration

  1. Navigate to the Routers section

  2. Click on vMX-R1, the Router which needs to be configured.

  1. Click on Utilities > Remote Shell

  1. A new shell window will open, enter edit mode.

edit

  1. To configure BGP on your device, enter the following commands (Copy the below bgp configuration and paste it on the shell):

set interfaces lo0 unit 0 family inet address 1.1.1.1/32
set routing-options autonomous-system 65001
set protocols bgp group EBGP_PEERS type external
set protocols bgp group EBGP_PEERS peer-as 65000
set protocols bgp group EBGP_PEERS log-updown
set protocols bgp group EBGP_PEERS local-address 10.10.1.2
set protocols bgp group EBGP_PEERS neighbor 10.10.1.1
set protocols bgp group EBGP_PEERS export EXPORT-BGP
set policy-options policy-statement EXPORT-BGP term 1 from route-filter 1.1.1.1/32 exact
set policy-options policy-statement EXPORT-BGP term 1 then accept
set policy-options policy-statement EXPORT-BGP then reject

  1. Commit the changes:

commit synchronize

Verification

  1. Navigate to Routers section, click on Utilities > Testing Tools

  1. Select Ping, then enter the ip address and initiate a ping

Note: **Ping** - verify the reachability to the next-hop

  1. The output confirms that the ping was successful. Similarly, we can use other options to gather more detailed information.

BGP Peering - verify bgp neighborship

  1. Select Show BGP Summary section, then Show BGP Summary option

  2. The output shows that BGP neighborship has been successfully established

Configure Alerts

  1. Navigate to Monitor section, click on Alerts > Alerts Configuration

  1. Click on Create Template, and enter the following:

  • Name - New Alerts

  • Applies to Scope - Site

    • India

  • Email Recipients Settings

    • To organization admins - Checked

    • To site admins - Checked

    • To additional email recipients - Add any additional emails you would like

  1. Select the Port (interface) and BGP status Alerts available under Infrastructure and click on Create

  1. Then click Save

  1. An Alert has been created, if required you can now edit or delete it

Router Insights & Events

  1. Navigate to the Routers section, and click on vMX-R4

Note: You can click on any of the Router to check its details/insights like, version, ports, inventory etc.

  1. Lets look at Router Events, Navigate to Monitor section

  2. Click Service Levels > Insights, then select vMX-R4

  1. To view configuration change, click a Configured event, then click View Details

  • Configuration Diff page appears displaying the configuration changes. Newly added configurations are highlighted in green, removed configurations are highlighted in red and modified configurations are highlighted in amber.

  1. Looking at Router Performance, the following graphs shows CPU Utilization, Memory Utilization, Bytes transmitted and received, Port errors.

  1. BGP Summary

  1. BGP Peers Summary: BGP Peers widget displays BGP peer information table with details such as BGP peer state, last flap event, last error and so on.

  2. Select a BGP peer from the peer drop-down list.

  3. Then select a routing table from the routing table drop-down list.

  1. The Peer Flaps graph shows the peer flaps delta for a selected BGP peer.

  2. The Routing Table Peer Stats graph shows the routing table’s prefixes (Active, Received, Accepted, Advertised) for the selected peer.

  1. Current Router Properties

  1. Navigate to Monitor > Alerts

  1. The Alerts page displays the generated alerts and notifies administrators about anomalies in the network.

Service Level Expectations

  1. To access the Service Levels Expectations page, go to Monitor > Service Levels > Routing

  1. By default, the view shows data for the Entire Org. However, you can filter by a specific Site and even a particular Router to view the Service Level Expectations (SLE) for that specific router within the selected site

  1. You can analyze the Service Level Matrix for Router Health by clicking on Router Health. This section provides various classifier and sub-classifier options for deeper insight

  1. Similarly, you can analyze the Service Level Matrix for Router Throughput by clicking on Router Throughput. This section also provides various classifier and sub-classifier options for detailed throughput analysis

Network Failure Root Cause Analysis

Disable (Shutdown) Core router interface

  1. Open vMX-R4 Remote Shell Utility

  1. Disable (shutdown) interface connected to vMX-R3 router

  1. Once the interface is disabled, an alert will be automatically generated—first for the physical port status, followed by a subsequent alert for the BGP neighborship loss. Additionally, a notification will be sent to the email address specified during the alert configuration process, ensuring prompt awareness and response to the event.

Check Alerts

  1. Click on Router Insights to understand the root cause of the Alert

  1. Select the Event and then click on View Details to know more details

  1. The pop-up window indicates that the interface was disabled, which triggered the corresponding Alert.

  1. Navigate to the Alerts section, where you’ll observe that the interface has gone down multiple times, resulting in repeated BGP neighborship flaps.

  1. The network admin should collect interface logs and event history from the JRA platform and share them with the Service Provider for troubleshooting and resolution.

Compliance Assessment and Audit Readiness

  1. Go to Routers section: the page will show all the Routers, their Name, IP Address, Model, Version

  1. Next go to Overview section: this page will show various details like.

  • Software Version - installed image release

  • Recommender Link - suggested releases

  • EOS date - end of support date

  • EOL link - OS dates & milestones

  1. Next go to SIRT section: this page will show all SIRT tickets for the router and OS

  2. Click on any of the SIRT to get its details

  1. A side pop-up will appear displaying the SIRT (Service Incident Response Ticket) details, along with a link to view more information about the SIRT ticket

  1. Next go to PBN section: this page will show all the Bugs for this router and OS

  2. Click on any of the bug to get more details

  1. Network admins can easily view compliance info like software versions, EOL/EOS status, and vulnerability alerts. This consolidated view simplifies audits, reduces manual work, and helps quickly generate accurate compliance reports for internal and regulatory needs.

You have successfully completed this Hands-On Lab!

Feel free to explore more about Juniper Routing Assurance at following link: https://www.juniper.net/us/en/products/cloud-services/routing-assurance.html

Lab Survey

Please take 2 minutes and complet the Routing Assurance Hands-On Lab Survey

RoutingAssurance-hol-Survey-qr-code