Wi-fi and the CiscoLive Community Operations Heart

It’s a privilege to serve within the CiscoLive NOC. Our crew of 60 folks labored exhausting to pre-stage, implement, and monitor the occasion held earlier this month on the RAI Amsterdam.

The RAI Amsterdam as seen from the south on the nhow resort

As you may think about it takes fairly a little bit of planning and energy to remodel an empty convention venue into the showcase we intend for patrons, companions, press and workers. The wi-fi concerned organising a pair of Catalyst 9800-80 wi-fi LAN controllers to serve the primary convention of 506 Cisco Catalyst 9120, 9130, 9124 and 9166I collection APs. A second pair of Catalyst 9800-80 wi-fi LAN controllers served the Keynote space of 92 Cisco Catalyst 9104 collection APs. Lastly, a 3rd pair of Catalyst 9800-40 wi-fi LAN controllers served the Assembly Village and Breakout areas of 138 Cisco Catalyst 9166I/D1 (Wi-Fi 6E) collection APs. The NOC crew took over the administration of the RAI Amsterdam’s current APs from their WLCs to our occasion WLCs. Some fill-in AP installs have been carried out to reinforce protection and for the keynote space.

Again of home NOC work space with wi-fi antennas to be deployed

Progressive build-out of the CiscoLive World of Options in RAI Amsterdam Corridor 1

We closely depend on monitoring and administration options like Catalyst Heart, Umbrella, and ThousandEyes, to call a number of. In my common position at Cisco as a part of the DevNet crew we evangelize community programmability, automation, and the usage of APIs. So, I are inclined to deal with including further worth within the NOC by way of extracting the embedded telemetry and instrumentation in our merchandise by way of utilizing open supply and ‘made to spec’ packages.

A typical dashboard utilized by the NOC could also be created by a Python script extracting NETCONF/YANG, SNMP MIB or CLI ‘present command’ information from a tool, then normalizing the knowledge for injection to InfluxDB, then rendering with Grafana.

The NOC demo space in RAI Amsterdam Corridor 7

A ‘constructed to spec’ dashboard displaying an HA pair of 9800 WLCs and their operational states

Whole wi-fi shoppers by controller cluster and IEEE normal

Heatmap displaying wi-fi shopper counts, transmit/obtain utilization, and channel utilization, per AP

Our latest dashboard, created this 12 months for CiscoLive Amsterdam, was a Sankey diagram depicting the wi-fi shopper depend splits throughout SSIDs, WPA and wi-fi protocol functionality.

Sankey diagram figuring out splits of wi-fi shoppers throughout SSID/WPA and wi-fi functionality

This dashboard helped us to know if some shoppers might have a greater wi-fi expertise in the event that they used a extra optimum SSID/WPA choice. What we might see are some shoppers defaulted to or picked the ‘CiscoLive’ SSID serving WPA2, the second technology Wi-Fi Protected Entry wi-fi safety protocol.  Nevertheless, 9% of those have been additionally Wi-Fi 6E (6 GHz) succesful.  We all know the Wi-Fi Alliance mandated assist for WPA3 safety for Wi-Fi 6, so all 802.11ax radios should assist WPA3. These shoppers might have acquired a greater expertise related to the ‘CiscoLive-WPA3’ SSID, as talked about on the again of the attendee badges.  Typically issues are solved technologically – different occasions, socially.  ????

We’re additionally within the adoption charges and ratios of shoppers to IEEE normal. Just a few dashboards helps us particularly establish these shoppers by SSID and others with out the SSID categorization.

Wi-fi shopper distribution by SSID and wi-fi normal

Dashboard displaying ratios of wi-fi shoppers by wi-fi normal

The occasion noticed the utmost variety of wi-fi shoppers, 16024, on the second day, February 7 at 12:06 CET.  In that 20.17% of the shoppers have been utilizing Wi-Fi5 (802.11ac), and 75.97% have been Wi-Fi6 (802.11ax 5GHz).  Evaluating this to final summer season’s CiscoLive US in Las Vegas, we grew from 66.8% Wi-Fi6.  Lastly, in comparison with final 12 months’s CiscoLive Europe in Amsterdam 2023, we grew from 62% Wi-Fi6.  Contemplating the years spent on Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), it’s good we’re seeing migration to newer capabilities.

Transferring ahead we’ll construct much more experiences and dashboards to achieve different insights about adoption and the way we are able to make expertise much more seamless.

Right here’s a YouTube video with extra background

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