Looking Ahead to MFD5: NetAlly

Posted on July 22, 2020 by subnetwork

I love it when companies show up to Mobility Field Day each year, ready to show their latest product, updates, and ideas.

Over the last several years, NetAlly (previously NetScout) has shown up each year to show off their updates and seek feedback on where they might focus next. NetAlly has proven to be receptive to feedback and responsive as they demonstrate advances in their handheld tools.

During the last year, we’ve seen the advancement of the Etherscope nXG to a survey tool with the introduction of AirMapper. This utility allows a wireless engineer to load a floorplan through Link-Live, import it to the Etherscope nXG, and then survey a facility, carrying only a single device. Once the survey is complete, it is re-synched to Link-Live for viewing, enabling easy, fast, and remote troubleshooting.

In today’s COVID-19 climate, remote troubleshooting is a significant boon to the tool. The simplicity of AirMapper makes it easy to ship to a local resource, who, with basic instructions, can perform a survey of the facility allowing the wireless SME’s to work in more places, faster, all from their home office.

I’m excited to see the latest news for the Etherscope nXG and AirMapper.

Link-Live is another product NetAlly continues to innovate on. Last year at MFD4, they announced several enhancements, including an API. The API enables the ability to create custom reports or integrate test results into existing customer systems.

I would love to see the API enable the ability to prepopulate sites or job lists and then archive old data based on labels.

The AirCheck G2 also received updates last year at MFD4, although the focus was clearly on the Etherscope nXG. It gained Wi-Fi6 visibility for management frames and headers, the ability to upload iPerf Test results to Link-Live, and a few other features. I’m guessing we’ll see a lot more information about the AirCheck G2 this year.

Finally, I would like to throw out a few things I hope to hear more about from NetAlly.

First, there are going to be some obvious questions about 6Ghz and Wi-Fi 6E. I’m sure NetAlly is working away on future products, and I hope they can begin to talk about what 6Ghz means for them.

I made a request last year, which you can find at the 20:50 mark here:

In short, I would like the AirCheck G2 and Etherscope nXG to have port profiles for a switch applied at the push of a button. Those profiles could be implemented by a technician installing an AP or other device without providing them access to an actual CLI or GUI or knowledge of how to do so. There are a LOT of ways to implement the idea with APIs, SNMP, or even Python scripts, so I know its not an easy task. It also highly variable depending on the switch vendor, model, and OS. But, considering the great functionality NetAlly continues to add to their devices, I am sure they are up to the challenge!

Whatever NetAlly brings to MFD5, I am sure it will significantly expand the functionality of their tools and make the lives of their users easier.

What would you like to see from NetAlly at MFD5? Be sure to check out the Mobility Field Day 5!

Celona – LTE for Enterprise at MFD4

Posted on September 23, 2019 by subnetwork

After the Mobility Field Day 4 live streams stopped, we secretly met with a secret company and were sworn to secrecy through a series of secret rituals and rites. OK, that might be a slight exaggeration, but there was definitely an unannounced company at MFD4.

That company, Celona, has now gone public, and it’s finally time to talk about what this could mean for the future of mobile devices inside enterprise networks. Here’s a hint: It is exciting!

Celona’s product is a fully integrated cloud based solution for CBRS or Citizens Band Radio Service. Before we go any further, understand that CBRS has nothing to do with truckers, Smokey and the Bandit, oversized antennas or anything near 27Mhz.

Instead, CBRS uses spectrum above 3.5Ghz and LTE technology with power output of up to 1watt/Mhz EIRP allowed by the FCC. The combination of higher power and LTE could mean a much broader coverage area than is usually offered by conventional Wi-Fi.

Further, clients that are CBRS capable must meet the much stricter 3GPP standards. Those standards highlight how weak and incapable the Wi-Fi Alliance is. Most importantly, those standards remove many of the client frustrations that many wireless engineers face daily such as poor 802.11r,k,v support.

Certification is required to install CBRS equipment and is attained after completing an online course. This course from Google cost $599 for the course and online exam, which makes it accessible to most wireless engineers who may decide to expand their craft and marketable skills. The certification is required as there are licensing requirements and frequency coordination, similar to those proposed for the 6ghz band due to incumbents in the space.

The best part of CBRS is that it allows enterprise customers to take ownership of their LTE coverage and data. Celona’s solution will enable ownership of the data path from the client device through the CBRS system and on to either internally hosted systems or out to the internet.

A quick google search will bring up a slew of articles screaming, “CBRS will kill Wi-Fi.” That is hardly the case. However, there are plenty of places where CBRS will be an excellent solution. For example, areas with high roaming requirements will benefit from the LTE underpinnings. Additionally, in medical and hospital systems iPhones, which are regularly used SIM-less to ensure HIPAA and PI data protection, will be able to connect to a hospital managed and controlled CBRS system.

Celona’s role in this space is providing the cloud based management solution and hardware. It’s easy to imagine them as the Mist Systems of CBRS, and that’s not far from the truth. Their business model is especially useful in CBRS, because it doesn’t require extensive knowledge of LTE standards to configure and manage a solution.

Before Celona’s vision can become fully realized, there are a few barriers to entry. In short, we need a skilled workforce that is capable and licensed to install and manage the equipment and appropriate tools required to design and troubleshoot installations.

The tools challenge is significant. Spectrum planning and coverage design is more complicated due to frequency coordination and licensing. Spectrum Analyzers which are currently capable of checking 3.5Ghz are very expensive and each new tool comes with a learning curve.

Considering the number of devices which support Band 48 out of the box, including the new iPhone, devices are already available. Celona brings the network that enterprises can install. With the right tools and enough licensed engineers, Celona and CBRS could have a very bright future.

Check out the event page at TechFieldDay.com and let me know what you think in the comments.

Introduction to Celona and CBRS Fundamentals from Gestalt IT on Vimeo.

MFD3 – LinkRunner G2 v2.0 Update

Posted on September 18, 2018 by subnetwork

I have an admission to make. Before Mobility Field Day 2 of 2017, I was openly hostile towards the biggest player in the handheld network tools market. Through a series of lousy blue and gold experiences, I decided I no longer had room for those tools in my budget. Even after receiving a blue and gold LinkSprinter at a WLPC, I was apathetic at best.

But, I like reexamining my strongly held opinions. I believe that admitting I am wrong is much better than holding firmly to an incorrect conclusion.

So, in 2017 when Netscout presented at MFD2, I got my opportunity to reconsider. They were working to expand the capabilities of the toolset, and they were open to feedback and requests for new features. I even considered purchasing an AirCheck G2, but ultimately found that I hadn’t budgeted for it. (Shocking!)

So, let’s fast forward to 2018 and MFD3. Over the two hour window Julio Petrovitch, from the handheld network tools group previously owned by Netscout, covered many topics, but the topics of most interest were the AirCheck G2 v3.0 and the LinkRunner G2 v2.0 software updates. So again, I got to reevaluate my opinion.

The very first revelation to me was this team now truly believes in updates! The LinkRunner was released last October, so approximately a year later they are adding features with v2.0. The announcement included significant new improvements and features, not just small dot revision updates and bug fixes.

The LinkRunner G2 v2.0 update adds:

802.3bt support – provides both loaded and unloaded voltage and wattage reporting of class 5-8 PoE PSE equipment
Injector support – measures from 12-60 volts
More VLAN information – the LinkRunner G2 can provide lots of information regarding the VLAN’s that are accessible from a switchport; useful if you have ports configured with a voice and data VLAN.
Enhanced DHCP Test – Now supports providing information from DHCP Options 43, 60, and 150.
Auto Test Improvements – allows a user to refine how they would like a test to run.
VLAN Monitor Tool – plug the LinkRunner G2 into a trunk port and monitor all of the VLAN’s that are available and the amount of traffic broadcast on each
Packet Captures – or as Julio Petrovitch correctly called it frame captures. Plug the device into a mirror or span port and capture traffic directly to the LinkRunner G2.

One more note; the LinkRunner G2 can charge from PoE! That isn’t a new feature, but it was one that I missed. I am mentioning it here for those others who might also be unaware.

So, the real question, have I changed my mind about Netscout? Maybe, but first, I think we should discuss the AirCheck G2.

Watch the whole presentation and then tell me what you’re most excited about in the comments.

MFD3 – Huge updates for AirCheck G2 and LinkRunner G2; then Netscout announces their sale

Posted on September 17, 2018 by subnetwork

Mobility Field Day 3 was great! If you missed it, I will be releasing a few blogs over the coming weeks from my experience at the event. In the meantime, you can watch all of the videos here:

https://techfieldday.com/event/mfd3/

One of the most interesting developments this morning was the announcement from Netscout that it was divesting its handheld network test division to StoneCalibre.

The press release can be found here:
https://www.netscout.com/news/press-release/netscout-divests-handheld-network-test-business

While this announcement creates quite a few questions around the future, I firmly believe that the great group of people who have brought us the recently announced LinkRunner G2 v2.0 and AirCheck G2 v3.0 software updates are going to keep killing it. I’m excited to see what they bring to us in the future and hope to see them presenting once again at Mobility Field Day 4.

VIAVI Observer Apex- Finding the needle faster

Posted on August 14, 2018 by subnetwork

I participated in the Tech Field Day Extra events at Cisco Live. One of the presenters, VIAVI has been floating near the edge of my awareness for a while, so it was great to see their presentation and get a better understanding of the VIAVI Observer Platform.

Anytime I see a presentation from a monitoring solution there are three questions that I ask:

“How useful would this be for tier one technicians?”

I usually consider that question from both the perspective of a NOC and also a helpdesk technician. If a monitoring tool isn’t practical for those roles, I am the one who gets stuck using it all of the time, and therefore, it has no place in my environment.

“How useful would this tool be for me?”

If the tool can’t offer enough information to be useful for a senior engineer, I don’t want to pay for it. It also increases the complexity of passing trouble tickets up the chain as each person has to start back at zero in their own tool.

“Does this make it easier to find the problem, or just add another step?”

Monitoring tools which only show up/down status and system logs have very little use for me. I can easily find those by other means, or on the device itself, faster than I can fire up a browser, click on a bookmark, log in, navigate through a device tree, etc.

VIAVI has provided the right answers to all three questions.

The starting page for Observer is simple. It doesn’t take forever to load as it attempts to pull data from many different sources to provide a general health overview that rarely has anything to do with the reason you opened the application. Instead, Observer’s search box is ready for any relevant text the technician may know about the problem. If you have an IP, MAC address, VLAN, or hostname, those are all great places to start. You can also choose to push into a more generalized monitoring view like Application Performance, Network Performance, etc.

The search box is the beauty of the application for me. VIAVI indexes all of the monitoring sources for things like MAC addresses, IP addresses, interfaces, usernames, and other metadata and then correlates that information together. A technician doesn’t need to look up an IP address in the ARP table, get the MAC address, look up the MAC address in the MAC address table to get the port, then check the port for errors. A search on the IP address will provide all of that information, quickly! Since VIAVI also knows the assigned VLAN, it quickly displays “Here’s a bad actor on the same VLAN that is flooding the VLAN with bad frames.” The technicians can find problems without looking directly for them. That’s a huge win. This is not looking for a needle in a haystack. This is turning on an extremely powerful magnet and letting the needle come to you.

Another great feature is that Observer creates a baseline from the information that it acquires. With that baseline that understands system X typically runs at 75 percent utilization, but is now running at 90 percent, more problems quickly float to the surface. Additionally, the baseline filters out the normal abnormal. Is it “normal” for that system to run at 75 percent utilization all of the time? Maybe so. If it is, a technician doesn’t need a warning about it. It might be operating as designed.

If a technician can’t find a solution through the dashboard, the next engineer who picks up the problem will want to dig deeper. Thanks to the stored packet traces which provided all of the metadata the technician used, the engineer can take a look at the actual packets. Aside from the standard fields like source and destination, IP’s and ports, Observer also includes a patent-pending User Experience Score which is a 1-10 scale to aid in finding problems faster within the trace files.

Taking the click-through troubleshooting one step further, Observer creates Application Dependency Maps which aid an engineer to understand all of the dependent systems quickly and which are affecting performance.

When considering my initial three questions I proposed, I feel VIAVI’s Observer is providing pretty compelling answers for each. I look forward to learning more.

In many ways, Tech Field Day offers a similar solution to VIAVI Observer. TFD allows me to filter through the marketing hype, and get to the bottom of a product or solution and whether it will be useful to me. Don’t forget to check out the many other videos and content created by Tech Field Day at Cisco Live.

Arista announces acquisition of Mojo Networks

Posted on August 2, 2018 by subnetwork

Today after the markets closed, Arista announced the acquisition of Mojo Networks. This is a very interesting development, and I am curious to see what Arista does with the technology.

You can read the press release here.

If you are asking “Who is Mojo Networks?” you clearly weren’t paying attention at MFD2 during the Mojo Networks presentation. Take a look at it here:

Mojo Presents at Mobility Field Day 2

You can see more at the Mobility Field Day 2 Event page:

http://techfieldday.com/appearance/mojo-networks-presents-at-mobility-field-day-2/

What do you think about this team up? Is this a good decision for Arista? How do you see it impacting the WiFi community?

Geek Tools – Cape Networks for more than just wireless

Posted on September 15, 2017 by subnetwork

In case you missed it, a couple of weeks ago I wrote about my experience testing Cape Networks solution for wireless monitoring. You can find that post here. I first learned about Cape Networks at WLPC, and was able to have a conversation with them at Mobility Field Day 2 that you can watch here.

One point that continues to impress me about Cape Networks is the ability to test much more than WiFi.

It really comes down to the strength of the dashboard and the various tests that each sensor can run. The ability to test against internal and external systems is one example.

Each sensor can test against web servers, iperf, or custom ports of your choosing.

Users can configure a test to run against predefined external websites like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office 365, Dropbox, and others. But, the sensor can also test against custom websites, checking not just “Is it up?” but HTTP status codes and latency as well.

I’ve used this recently to help an outside vendor truly understand that “No, our network is not to blame” for the high latency their users are complaining about.

When all other external websites are seeing ~20ms latency, and your web application is averaging ~90ms over a period of weeks, guess what? YOU have a problem!

Averaging 96ms of latency. Maybe that’s why the application is always slow?

Obviously, due to the nature of these tests being performed over WiFi, latency, jitter, and packet loss are all expected to be a bit higher, especially if they are performed during times of peak WiFi utilization. However, when you have tests to compare across multiple online services, it’s easy to notice standout patterns.

One feature request I would make to Cape Networks is this: Allow test to be ran across both the LAN and WiFi connections. If we can compare across these two mediums, we may also see additional information useful in diagnosing wireless issues.

Have you found a non-WiFi use for the Cape Networks sensors? If so, tell me about them in the comments.

As a MFD2 delegate, I did receive a free sensor from Cape Networks and various stickers and other low value (but tasty) snacks. All other expenses for MFD were covered by Tech Field Day. I was not compelled to write about Cape Networks in any way other than personal user experience. My employers decision to purchase sensors was based solely on the user experience and ease of problem resolution.

Geek Tools – Cape Networks for Wireless Monitoring

Posted on August 28, 2017 by subnetwork

“Wireless isn’t working!” – everyone

How many times have we heard that mantra? As wireless engineers we know all of the intricate details that are required to be in place before wireless “just works.” We often find ourselves trying to explain this to people who see wireless as magic, and us as the magicians. They don’t care about the intricacies of roaming. They don’t care about the underlying systems, many of which we rarely control. DHCP, DNS, RADIUS, and ultimately the services they are trying to connect to.

Assuming a medium to large sized corporate environment, there is likely someone (a team) responsible for the DNS, DHCP, and Radius, and that is not likely to be the same team responsible for wireless. In very large environments, the LAN team that even provides the network cable for the AP may be a different team.

Further increasing the confusion is that problems can often appear isolated, with only a small group of users experiencing the issue.

Then the troubleshooting must begin. Is it a client issue? Were drivers or firmware recently updated on the users systems? Is there a common location, time, or AP that the experience is related to? The list of questions begin to build.

I ran into this in my own network recently. Users were complaining of being unable to connect to wireless. The problems were reported from various locations slowly over a number of days. No particular client was having consistent issues, and I never saw the problem on a customers computer while they were having it. I began looking through logs and following pretty standard troubleshooting steps. Nothing came up. It was as if the problem didn’t exist, yet I was hearing about it often enough to believe that it did.

Considering that I had just returned from Mobility Field Day 2 and participated in the Cape Networks session, I had an idea. Cape Networks provided delegates with a sensor to test. I spoke with my manager at work, a very smart guy (he hired me, right?) who agreed it would be OK to test the sensor in our environment.

The secret to the Cape Networks sensor is that it IS a client. It sees what a client experiences and its entire function is to report on the user experience. It is cloud connected, with an intuitive dashboard, that makes setup and management easy, and remote troubleshooting painless. You really should watch the Cape Networks presentation!

After installing the sensor and configuring the device for our wireless network and the internal services that I wanted it to test, I walked away and forgot about it for a day.
The next morning, I logged back in, and my issue was staring me in the face. DHCP

The time to get a DHCP address was all over the map, peaking as high as 11 seconds. Problem found! Users who experienced those peaks would clearly have issues connecting; add in their own impatience, maybe turning off and on wireless, and of course they couldn’t connect.

Before and after changes were implemented to resolve the DHCP issues users experienced.

Before and after changes were made to DHCP.

What was even more important was that I now had clear metrics that I could take to my team that manages DHCP. I could point to the problem, and then after we developed and implemented a resolution, I was able to point to the same metrics as proof that our plan worked.

As you might have guessed, complaints and rumors of complaints quickly died away.

My organization has since made the decision to invest in sensors from Cape Networks. Their reporting and ease of use make for an unmistakable value. I strongly recommend that you also check them out.

Looking ahead to Mobility Field Day 2

Posted on July 24, 2017 by subnetwork

This week I am attending Mobility Field Day 2, taking place in San Jose, CA! This is my seventh event with Tech Field Day and I am excited for what the week has to offer.

As an attendee at Network Field Day 8 and 9, the focus in networking was towards Datacenter and WAN. During that same time, my personal career was arcing towards wireless. I was reading, thinking, and practicing a lot of wireless for a major global manufacturing company. I left from those events feeling amazed at all that was happening within the realm of networking, but also feeling like an imposter.

I wasn’t worrying much about SDN WAN, I was too focused on designing and deploying high density wireless in a manufacturing space. I wasn’t thinking about data center, but I was instead providing coverage to warehouses in the million+ sq/ft range.

A lot has happened in my career since those events, and I have made myself at home in the realm of wireless. I continue to learn and grow as a wireless engineer, and Mobility Field Day is another step in my development. More importantly, I’m at an event that speaks to my passion. Tech Field Day events are always incredibly informative, but this one just resonates!

We have some great presenters this week, including Cape Networks, Mist Systems, Mojo Networks, Netscout, and Nyansa.

Aside from the presenters, Mobility Field Day 2 has some awesome delegates, many of whom I consider friends. The opportunity to exchange ideas, ask questions, and participate with them is very exciting.

Speaking of participation, my absolute favorite part of Mobility Field Day is that everyone can participate. Nearly all of the sessions are live streamed. You can watch with us live, send tweets or DM’s, and be part of the event yourself.

Please feel free to send me your questions on Twitter. I will be happy to ask them as time allows and you too can participate in what looks to be another great Tech Field Day event!

It must be the network…

Ramblings of JD (@subnetwork)

Category Archives: TFD