Section 1: Exploring a live environment

Juniper Apstra

Estimated time: 15 minutes

You are working with a fully operational Apstra-managed fabric. The network is already running, devices are deployed, and traffic is flowing. Your goal in this section is to understand what you are looking at before you start making changes.

Your instructor will confirm which lab you are working with

Before you start: two things worth understanding

What is a blueprint?

A blueprint is the heart of everything in Apstra. It is a live, continuously validated model of your entire data centre — the design intent, the deployed configuration, and a constant comparison between the two. Everything you do in this lab happens inside a blueprint.

When Apstra detects that your live network does not match the blueprint, it raises an anomaly. When you make a change in the blueprint and commit it, Apstra pushes that change to every affected device simultaneously.

How Apstra manages changes: Staged vs Active

Before you navigate anywhere, this concept is worth understanding because you will see it everywhere.

Apstra separates what you want from what is running:

View What it shows

Staged

Your design workspace. Make changes here — add racks, create networks, connect servers. Nothing touches the live network until you commit.

Active

What is actually running right now. The live network, continuously validated against the blueprint.

Uncommitted

The difference between what you have staged and what is currently active. This is your review step before anything goes live.

When you click Commit, Apstra calculates exactly what needs to change on every device, generates the configuration, and pushes it — all in one operation. You will do this several times during the lab, and each commit creates a permanent, reversible snapshot of the network state.

Navigating to your blueprint

  • From the Apstra main menu, navigate to Blueprints.

  • Find your assigned lab blueprint.

Selecting the assigned lab blueprint

You will land on the blueprint dashboard.

Navigting the blueprint

Your dashbaord will show No systems assigned yet as we have no real devices assigneed to this blueprint. That is expected and does not affect the rest of the lab exercises.
Blueprint dashboard overview

Exploring the topology

  • In the top tab menu, navigate to Staged [Physical > Topology]

The topology view shows every device in the fabric and every link between them. Hover over a device to see its role, model, and current status.

  • Click on a spine switch to open its detail panel.

You are about to see something that illustrates the core difference between Apstra and traditional network management. Rather than logging into the device and running show running-config, you can view the full configuration Apstra has generated and deployed — directly from the blueprint.

  • Click the Rendered Configuration tab.

Rendered device configuration — the full config Apstra has deployed to this switch

This is the complete configuration running on that device — underlay BGP, overlay EVPN, interfaces, routing policies. None of it was written by hand. It was generated from the blueprint design and pushed automatically when the fabric was built.

In a traditional environment, this configuration exists only as a file on the device — disconnected from any record of why it was written that way. In Apstra, every line of configuration is an expression of the blueprint. When the blueprint changes, the configuration changes with it — across every device, simultaneously.