Overview of Juniper Mist Wireless Assurance
SUMMARY Juniper Mist Wireless Assurance is a cloud-based subscription service that serves as a single pane of glass for configuring, monitoring, and optimizing wireless access.
Juniper Mist™ Wireless Assurance includes access points (APs), Mist Edge devices, wireless LANs (WLANs), radio management, security, network segmentation, and a lot of automation. But perhaps the best benefits come from the telemetry streaming from Juniper APs, switches, and WAN (SSR, SRX) devices. Mist AI leverages this telemetry data to report on users' network experiences and perform automated root-cause analysis using adaptive learning which reduces manual troubleshooting and increases overall network optimization.
You'll configure and manage your wireless network by using the Juniper Mist portal. If you're just getting started with Juniper Mist, see the Juniper Mist Quick Start Guide and the Juniper Mist Management Guide.
Features and Benefits
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.
Features
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Customizable wireless service levels allow you to set and monitor service-level experiences (SLEs) for key performance metrics gathered on individual and multiple users.
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Data science applied to the aggregate SLE performance data to learn and optimize radio settings to assure performance and adapt signal interference.
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Dynamic Packet Capture automatically starts a packet capture when a user's connection fails.
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Using data science and machine learning, the Proactive Analytics and Correlation Engine (PACE) aides root-cause identification so you can identify and fix the issue.
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Guest access that provides flexible configuration options including:
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Multiple language support.
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Customizable branding.
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Social login.
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External captive portal integration.
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AAA/RADIUS integration.
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WxLAN policies let you secure network resources (such as servers and printers) by allowing only selected users and devices to connect to them.
Benefits of Cloud-Based Architecture
Wireless assurance runs in the cloud. You don't have any on-premise intermediary controllers to install or manage, so your network is easy to scale.
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.
To comply with data-residency regulations and optimize performance, Juniper deploys Mist clouds 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.
The Mist microservice architecture naturally supports multitenancy, and inherently scales with the elasticity of the cloud. Thus, for example, a Managed Service Provider (MSP) can manage wireless access 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, and a comprehensive view.
Benefits of Centralized Portal
From the Juniper Mist portal, you can configure radio management, set up access policies, and configure security (encryption, access, and malicious AP detection). You can also group and configure (or preconfigure), dozens, even thousands, of APs so they are automatically onboarded to the network once the AP is powered on and has Internet access. Likewise, you can define however many WLANs you want, for example, to provide a secure network for office spaces, one for guest portals, one for IoT devices, and another for the automated cranes in your warehouses.
When the network is configured, the Juniper APs send real-time telemetry representing users' network experiences to the Juniper Mist portal. Data is consolidated and measured against the performance metrics that you've set.
For strategic wireless network configuration updates, Mist AI aggregates AP data collected over multiple days, where it uses machine learning to identify trends and make performance optimizations. Individually, a Juniper AP can automatically make real-time updates in response to acute changes in the network, for example in response to channel interference or congestion.
Wireless Service Levels
Service-level experiences (SLEs) help you understand a user's wireless network experience. Juniper APs collect key data of every user's wireless experience and normalizes the data to a user minute metric, which is then rolled up in the Juniper Mist cloud, which applies machine learning to create useful information. From the dashboard, you can visualize the data for the entire organization, individual sites, or even individual clients. For more information, see the Wireless SLEs chapter of this guide.
Insights
Client and AP Insights provide an overview of the network experience across an entire site, including detailed 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. This is shown in Figure 1.
When you select an event from the list, the Mist portal displays a summary of the event to the right of the list. You can do the same for the AP Events block by clicking the settings button in the upper- right corner of the block.
In the Access Points block, you can see the names of all APs associated with the selected site. Along with the AP name, you can see the connection status, MAC address, uptime, and other information. When you click the name of the AP, the configuration page for that AP appears, where you can view and edit the configuration details.
Templates and Device Profiles
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, in an RF template, or in a WLAN 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.
To learn about the different configuration options, see Templates and Device Profiles.