Overview of Juniper Mist Wi-Fi Assurance

The Juniper Mist portal is entirely API driven and provides configuration options for every aspect of your wireless network from user and role definition to policy application, From WLAN template definition and application to device profiles that let you make exceptions to the templates. From site setup to problem investigation, you can do everything within the Mist portal. There's no need to go to a separate controller interface to manage what policies are applied to the APs or go to a separate switch-management platform to control the links from the APs to the switched network.

With APIs behind every function, you can programatically control every aspect of your network. For the GUI-minded, there's the Mist portal. For the automators and integrators, there's the Mist API Reference.

Scalable architecture and network automation

The Juniper Mist platform is built on a modern microservices cloud architecture, which enables elastic scalability to meet your network needs. The architecture naturally supports multitenancy, and inherently scales with the elasticity of the cloud. Thus, a Managed Service Provider (MSP) can manage wireless sites and networks for dozens of client organizations. Or a large retailer can accommodate various site-specific requirements yet still manage the organization centrally, with a single login per cloud. Other features and benefits include:

• Microservices—Our cloud-based microservices architecture allows for scalability and flexibility as your needs change.
• Open APIs—Juniper Mist is 100% programmable with all functions available through open APIs. Every task you can perform in the Mist GUI you can perform through the use of an API call. To learn more about Mist automation, see the Mist Automation Guide. For a complete, searchable list of APIs that you can try out for yourself, see the Mist API Reference.
• No controllers to manage—Wi-Fi assurance runs in the cloud. You don't have any on-premise intermediary controllers to install or manage, so your network scales easily.
• Maintain a centralized data path—When an organization needs to retain a centralized datapath architecture for campus or branch deployments, the Juniper Mist Edge appliance provides that datapath. This allows Mist to provide some functionality of a controller-based solution while keeping all control and management functions in the Juniper Mist cloud.

  Regulatory compliance—To comply with data-residency regulations and optimize performance, Juniper deploys Mist cloud instances world-wide. Server locations include Europe, Asia, and Australia. In the United States, we have servers on the east and west coasts as well as a US federal cloud.

• MIST. AI is in the air. MIST is the first vendor in over a decade to bring true innovation to the wireless space.

  By leveraging a modern cloud architecture with microservices, the MIST Learning WLAN eliminates the challenges of legacy wireless controllers and the shortcomings of early cloud solutions. First introduced in 2003, controllers are hardware devices that run a single monolithic software image. Over time, more and more features were added to the controller's common code base, creating interdependencies that greatly increased the complexity of the software.

  Development and testing cycles became longer, engineering teams got larger, and software bugs grew out of control. This all changes if your platform is built on the modern cloud. Complex applications are now split into core functions called microservices, each of which are designed by a small and focused development team.

  Services are designed independently of one another using optimized technology stacks chosen specifically for that service. Adding or removing features is simple, and bugs are fixed in near real-time, without network disruption. Services scale up or down elastically when they're needed, without requiring expensive hardware.

  And the platform is inherently resilient, as the failure of one service does not impact the others. And since this is all software, we can help customers realize cloud-like agility at the edge. Most business applications have already moved to the more efficient modern cloud.

  Now wireless can too, leaving outdated controllers and their archaic software for the history books. Agility. Flexibility.

  Scalability. Intelligence. This is the new wireless network built on the modern cloud.

  MIST. AI is in the air.

Proactive optimization of wireless performance

Juniper Mist managed WLANs undergo periodic optimization as part of our radio resource management (RRM) implementation. There's a once-daily RRM optimization, based on machine-learning data, that is applied to all APs in a site. You can also trigger individual frequency band optimization when you make changes to certain settings.

• Customizable wireless service levels—You can set and monitor service level expectation (SLE) metrics for key performance areas gathered on client devices. These SLEs determine what constitutes success in your network including connection times, throughput, and more. The Wireless Capacity SLE plays a key role in the RRM optimizations mentioned previously. See Service Level Expectations (SLE)
• AI-Driven RRM—Data science applied to the aggregate SLE performance data to optimize radio settings, assure performance, adapt to signal interference, and respond to environmental issues. See Radio Management.
• Digital Transformation with Network Insights—The Juniper Mist Wi-Fi Assurance service includes base capabilities for analyzing up to 7 days of data, simplifying the process of extracting network insights from data across your enterprise.

Flexible and Secure Guest Wi-Fi Access

Guest access is an important consideration for any enterprise WLAN. Juniper Mist provides many options to customize your WLAN for guest access, including:

• Scalable guest access solution—Your guest access solution can incorporate flexible options including: multiple language support, customizable branding, social login, external captive portal integration, and AAA/RADIUS integration. See WLAN Guest Portal.
• WLAN Segmentation—Segment your guest WLAN by using multiple preshared keys (PSKs) and making each PSK a personal WLAN. There's no connectivity between devices with different PSKs.
• Guest traffic—You can locally bridge guest traffic, tie it to a dedicated guest Ethernet port, or tunnel it to a centralized concentrator from your access points.
• WxLAN policies—Secure network resources such as servers and printers by allowing only selected users and devices to connect to them.

Troubleshooting and proactive root cause identification

• Dynamic Packet Capture—Automatically starts a packet capture when certain failure events happen in the network. See Dynamic and Manual Packet Captures.
• Root Cause Identification—Using data science and machine learning, the Proactive Analytics and Correlation Engine (PACE) aides in the root-cause identification of problems so you can quickly identify and fix issues.

Mist service level expectations (SLEs) help you understand a user's wireless network experience. Juniper APs collect key data about every user's wireless experience, upload it to the cloud, then the Juniper Mist portal normalizes the data to a user minute metric. Then the Juniper Mist portal applies machine learning to create measurable, actionable information about successful connections, time to connect, wireless throughput and more. Was the user experience good or bad in the last user minute? If it was bad, which SLE was not met?

At any time, you can see how your network is performing against the wireless SLEs with deep visibility into impacted users, applications, and devices. From the various Mist dashboards, you can visualize this information across the entire organization, individual sites, or even individual clients.

Service-level expectations (SLEs) help you understand a user's wireless network experience. Juniper APs collect key data about every user's wireless experience and normalizes the data into a "user minute" metric. The user minute is then rolled up in the Juniper Mist cloud, which applies machine learning to create measurable and actionable information. Was the user experience good or bad in the last user minute? If it was bad, which SLE was not met?

From the dashboard, you can visualize the data for the entire organization, individual sites, or even individual clients.

You can see the Wireless SLEs by navigating to Monitor > Service Levels and clicking the Wireless button as highlighted in Figure 1. Also highlighed in Figure 1 is the time filter. As you can see, the filter is currently set to show Wireless SLE metrics for today on the Live Demo site. You can also configure the scope of the visualization for a single site, an entire organization, specific APs or clients as shown below.

For more information, see the No link title.

You can gain insights into several aspects of your network deployment by navigating to Monitor > Service Levels and clicking the Insights button. Insights are a high-level look at specific events and the current status of several aspects of your network including wireless and wired clients, APs, Applications, and more, You can adjust the scope of the displayed Insights to any shown below and filter based on time.

These Insights provide an overview of the network experience including views into your WLANs and APs. For example, you can select a site and a time period at the top of the page and then drill-down into AP-level events that you are interested in. You can see this in Figure 2 animation below.

See Insights Overview in the AIOps Guide for more information.

In the Juniper Mist dashboard, you'll often find that the same configuration settings can be made in different places. For example, you can configure RRM and other radio settings directly on the Juniper APs, in a device profile, or in an RF template. The modular design makes it easy to scale configurations across different AP groupings, and it provides flexibility so you can quickly associate any combination of APs, WLANs, access policies, and RF configurations.

Note:

Mist recommends using templates, device profiles, and other group configuration options to simplify the management of your devices and networks in the Mist portal. Using these configuration aids prevents direct device or network configuration which can be error-prone and difficult to track.

For details, see: RRM Configuration Options.

Mist’s WxLAN policies allow you to use organization and site-level labels to rapidly define a list of rules, restrictions, and other settings for any device so they are securely managed in the network. You can apply labels to many types of objects including users, WLANs, APs, IP addresses, IP subnets, applications,, etc. You can easily apply policy to endpoints, regardless of their authentication/authorization method. Labeling and visual policy design help you replace multiple lines of CLI Syntax with easy to read graphic policy displays.

See WxLAN Access Policies for more details.

The Wi-Fi Assurance service automatically starts capturing packets when an anomaly is detected. Mist captures more than 150 state changes for each client device and access point every few seconds.

With this record, you are able to rewind back in time to see what was going on exactly when the event occurred. This eliminates hours of guesswork or time spent trying to reproduce an issue.

Predictive recommendations and automated workflows in Marvis actions let you quickly solve problems or prevent them entirely.

See Dynamic and Manual Packet Captures for more information.