It is a privilege to serve within the CiscoLive NOC. Our staff of 60 folks labored arduous 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 lodge
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 staff. The wi-fi concerned establishing a pair of Catalyst 9800-80 wi-fi LAN controllers to serve the principle convention of 506 Cisco Catalyst 9120, 9130, 9124 and 9166I sequence APs. A second pair of Catalyst 9800-80 wi-fi LAN controllers served the Keynote space of 92 Cisco Catalyst 9104 sequence APs. Finally, a 3rd pair of Catalyst 9800-40 wi-fi LAN controllers served the Meeting Village and Breakout areas of 138 Cisco Catalyst 9166I/D1 (Wi-Fi 6E) sequence APs. The NOC staff took over the administration of the RAI Amsterdam’s present APs from their WLCs to our occasion WLCs. Some fill-in AP installs had been achieved to enhance protection and for the keynote space.
Back of home NOC work space with wi-fi antennas to be deployed
       
Progressive build-out of the CiscoLive World of Solutions in RAI Amsterdam Hall 1
We closely depend on monitoring and administration options like Catalyst Center, Umbrella, and ThousandEyes, to call just a few. In my common position at Cisco as a part of the DevNet staff we evangelize community programmability, automation, and using APIs. So, I are inclined to deal with including extra worth within the NOC by means of extracting the embedded telemetry and instrumentation in our merchandise by means 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 ‘show command’ information from a tool, then normalizing the knowledge for injection to InfluxDB, then rendering with Grafana.
The NOC demo space in RAI Amsterdam Hall 7
A ‘built to spec’ dashboard displaying an HA pair of 9800 WLCs and their operational states
Total wi-fi purchasers by controller cluster and IEEE commonplace
Heatmap displaying wi-fi consumer counts, transmit/obtain utilization, and channel utilization, per AP
Our latest dashboard, created this yr for CiscoLive Amsterdam, was a Sankey diagram depicting the wi-fi consumer depend splits throughout SSIDs, WPA and wi-fi protocol functionality.
Sankey diagram figuring out splits of wi-fi purchasers throughout SSID/WPA and wi-fi functionality
This dashboard helped us to know if some purchasers 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 purchasers defaulted to or picked the ‘CiscoLive’ SSID serving WPA2, the second era Wi-Fi Protected Access wi-fi safety protocol. However, 9% of those had been additionally Wi-Fi 6E (6 GHz) succesful. We know the Wi-Fi Alliance mandated help for WPA3 safety for Wi-Fi 6, so all 802.11ax radios should help WPA3. Those purchasers might have acquired a greater expertise related to the ‘CiscoLive-WPA3’ SSID, as talked about on the again of the attendee badges. Sometimes issues are solved technologically – different instances, socially. ????
We are additionally within the adoption charges and ratios of purchasers to IEEE commonplace. A couple of dashboards helps us particularly establish these purchasers by SSID and others with out the SSID categorization.
Wireless consumer distribution by SSID and wi-fi commonplace
Dashboard displaying ratios of wi-fi purchasers by wi-fi commonplace
The occasion noticed the utmost variety of wi-fi purchasers, 16024, on the second day, February 7 at 12:06 CET. In that 20.17% of the purchasers had been utilizing Wi-Fi5 (802.11ac), and 75.97% had been Wi-Fi6 (802.11ax 5GHz). Comparing this to final summer season’s CiscoLive US in Las Vegas, we grew from 66.8% Wi-Fi6. Finally, in comparison with final yr’s CiscoLive Europe in Amsterdam 2023, we grew from 62% Wi-Fi6. Considering the years spent on Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), it’s good we’re seeing migration to newer capabilities.
Moving ahead we are going to construct much more experiences and dashboards to realize different insights about adoption and the way we are able to make expertise much more seamless.
Here’s a YouTube video with extra background
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