I heard this is coming soon. Looks like it'll provide much better visibility into our wireless deployments. Has anyone seen a demo or have any other insights about it?
https://meraki.cisco.com/solutions/wireless-health
I'm really looking forward to getting a beta or trial of this. I'm not sure it's coming anytime soon though.
Hey Crew, I'll try to remember to post back here when it's available as an early beta, maybe in a month or two. The only demo there might have been so far was a sneak peek at Cisco Live Barcelona, although it may have just been a couple of slides, not sure.
This is going to be a free feature update, no hardware to deploy, no software to install, no extra licensing, just a new feature that shows up in Dashboard. The basic idea is that more and more deployments are wireless first, and for too long we've been needling through event logs and packet captures... It's time for the cloud to do the heavy lifting with advanced analytics to show us what's actually happening.
So there should be some type of wireless health overview page, but in Meraki fashion there would be additional tabs for things like connection speeds, latency, and loss, which can say a lot about how applications are behaving, like examining latency performance by traffic class (voice, video, BE and background traffic). Plus metrics and anomaly detection for client associations, connection quality/latency (how responsive is the wifi), and capacity (actual vs perceived data rates).
You'll be able to identify and troubleshoot (and differentiate) authentication issues versus DHCP issues versus DNS versus L7 application issues, as well as spot anomalies in that data. And also in Meraki fashion, you should be able to view this in a summary report type of fashion, where you can specify all networks or specific networks, along with the desired time frame.
Coupled with other new tools like Meraki Insight, Dashboard will be able to tell us when and where we're sick, and even help prescribe a fix.
I'm guessing that the new "Radius and VLAN request status" section of the AP monitor is a bridge to that functionality?
I'm very much looking forward to this and RF Profiles.
@randhall No, I think this will be a new feature that you'll likely find under Wireless > Monitor > Wireless Health once it's enabled. Also @Adam @MRCUR I forgot to mention earlier if you want to see a simple & quick demo of Wireless Health, here's one from the recent Cisco Live Barcelona during the opening keynote around the 57-minute mark: https://youtu.be/rk6lQn8_7gQ?t=3438
@MerakiDave Thanks Dave! That was a good overview. Very excited to see this launch.
I just noticed this new whitepaper which gives some more info:
https://meraki.cisco.com/lib/pdf/meraki_whitepaper_wireless_health.pdf
Have we heard any more updates on a possible release date for this feature?
Going by the Quarterly Update, they're targeting the end of May for GA. You should reach out to your SE to see if you can get beta access.
Wireless Health is now rolling out in Dashboard! Really awesome tool that should make MR troubleshooting much easier. https://twitter.com/MerakiSimon/status/997154588640927744
I thought they activated my beta but this makes more sense.