Introduction
The Juniper MX-Series Router runs on Junos OS i.e. a reliable, high-performance, modular network operating system that is supported across all of Juniper’s physical and virtual routing, switching, and security platforms. The Juniper MX Series routers can be deployed as IP/IP VPN edge routers, Ethernet VPN (EVPN) and virtual private LAN service (VPLS) provider edge (VPLS-PE) routers, MPLS label-switching (LSR) routers, and as Layer2 Ethernet switches or Layer3 IP routers. The Juniper MX router is designed to offer the following features:
- High availability - Non-Stop Routing (NSR), Non-Stop Bridging (NSB), Graceful Routing Engine Switchover (GRES), Graceful Restart (GR), and In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU)
- Routing - RIP, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, and Multicast
- Switching - Full suite of Spanning Tree Protocols (STP), Service Provider VLAN tag manipulation, QinQ, and the ability to scale beyond 4,094 bridge domains by leveraging virtual switches
- Inline services - Network Address Translation (NAT), IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX), Tunnel Services, and Port Mirroring
- MPLS - L3VPN, L2VPNs, and VPLS
- Broadband services - PPPoX, DHCP, Hierarchical QoS, and IP address tracking
- Virtualization - Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation, Virtual Chassis, Logical Systems, Virtual Switches
With such a large feature set, the use case of the Juniper MX router is very broad. It’s common to see it in the core of a Service Provider network, providing BNG, or in the Enterprise providing edge routing or core switching.
Owing to the popularity and use cases of the MX router, it becomes essential for administrators to keep an eye on the health and functions of the core components of the MX router to ensure that users receive continued connectivity to the services of their interest. For this purpose, eG offers a specialized monitoring model for continuously monitoring the MX router and pointing you to the abnormalities in the CPU load, health, memory utilization and network latency on the MX router.
