This can be a privilege to serve within the CiscoLive NOC. Our workforce of 60 folks labored onerous to pre-stage, put into effect, and observe the development held previous this month on the RAI Amsterdam.

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

As you’ll believe it takes moderately somewhat of making plans and energy to change into an empty convention venue into the exhibit we intend for patrons, companions, press and workers. The wi-fi concerned putting in a couple of Catalyst 9800-80 wi-fi LAN controllers to serve the primary convention of 506 Cisco Catalyst 9120, 9130, 9124 and 9166I sequence APs. A 2d pair of Catalyst 9800-80 wi-fi LAN controllers served the Keynote house of 92 Cisco Catalyst 9104 sequence APs. After all, a 3rd pair of Catalyst 9800-40 wi-fi LAN controllers served the Assembly Village and Breakout spaces of 138 Cisco Catalyst 9166I/D1 (Wi-Fi 6E) sequence APs. The NOC workforce took over the control of the RAI Amsterdam’s current APs from their WLCs to our match WLCs. Some fill-in AP installs had been performed to reinforce protection and for the keynote house.

Again of space NOC paintings house with wi-fi antennas to be deployed

Innovative build-out of the CiscoLive International of Answers in RAI Amsterdam Corridor 1

We closely depend on tracking and control answers like Catalyst Middle, Umbrella, and ThousandEyes, to call a couple of. In my common function at Cisco as a part of the DevNet workforce we evangelize community programmability, automation, and the usage of APIs. So, I generally tend to concentrate on including further worth within the NOC thru extracting the embedded telemetry and instrumentation in our merchandise thru the usage of open supply and ‘made to spec’ methods.

A normal dashboard utilized by the NOC is also created by means of a Python script extracting NETCONF/YANG, SNMP MIB or CLI ‘display command’ information from a tool, then normalizing the guidelines for injection to InfluxDB, then rendering with Grafana.

The NOC demo house in RAI Amsterdam Corridor 7

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

Overall wi-fi purchasers by means of controller cluster and IEEE same old

Heatmap appearing wi-fi consumer counts, transmit/obtain usage, and channel usage, in step with AP

Our latest dashboard, created this yr for CiscoLive Amsterdam, was once a Sankey diagram depicting the wi-fi consumer depend splits throughout SSIDs, WPA and wi-fi protocol capacity.

Sankey diagram figuring out splits of wi-fi purchasers throughout SSID/WPA and wi-fi capacity

This dashboard helped us to grasp if some purchasers may have a greater wi-fi enjoy in the event that they used a extra optimum SSID/WPA variety. What shall we see are some purchasers defaulted to or picked the ‘CiscoLive’ SSID serving WPA2, the second one era Wi-Fi Secure Get entry to wi-fi safety protocol.  Then again, 9% of those had been additionally Wi-Fi 6E (6 GHz) succesful.  We all know the Wi-Fi Alliance mandated strengthen for WPA3 safety for Wi-Fi 6, so all 802.11ax radios should strengthen WPA3. The ones purchasers may have won a greater enjoy hooked up to the ‘CiscoLive-WPA3’ SSID, as discussed at the again of the attendee badges.  Every so often issues are solved technologically – different occasions, socially.  ????

We also are within the adoption charges and ratios of purchasers to IEEE same old. A couple of dashboards is helping us particularly determine the ones purchasers by means of SSID and others with out the SSID categorization.

Wi-fi consumer distribution by means of SSID and wi-fi same old

Dashboard appearing ratios of wi-fi purchasers by means of wi-fi same old

The development noticed the utmost selection of wi-fi purchasers, 16024, on the second one day, February 7 at 12:06 CET.  In that 20.17% of the purchasers had been the usage of Wi-Fi5 (802.11ac), and 75.97% had 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.  After all, in comparison to final yr’s CiscoLive Europe in Amsterdam 2023, we grew from 62% Wi-Fi6.  Bearing in mind the years spent on Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), it’s great we’re seeing migration to more moderen functions.

Shifting ahead we will be able to construct much more experiences and dashboards to realize different insights about adoption and the way we will be able to make era much more seamless.

Right here’s a YouTube video with extra background

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