CTS 141: Analytics Data & Wi-Fi

Nyansa provides visibility into your Wi-Fi network. What can you do with it? Analytics Data & Wi-Fi Coming off Mobility Field Day 3 (MFD3), Nyansa brings a couple of updates. There’s a lot of data collected and presented onto the dashboard. What could be challenging is understanding all the data you’re able to see. And it’s not just data from the Wi-Fi equipment. Nyansa’s product will gather information from other systems of your network such as RADIUS servers, DNS servers, and other data collected from SPAN ports. As we all know, Wi-Fi issues are often not Wi-Fi at all. Collecting this much data really gives you a broad look at how the network is performing for the clients. Where Nyansa can shine further is by providing data correlation to show you what’s the most critical issue or most impact there is on the network. The data is there in the dashboard but if there’s specific troubleshooting you’re trying to perform, you can dig into further based on clients, APs, DNS servers, etc. Full Client Experience What are we trying to get at with all this data collection and analytics? We want to understand how the clients are doing on our Wi-Fi networks. Down from Layer 1 and 2 all the way up to the Application performance. All these stats are collected within Nyansa and analyzed. Nyansa now has the a client agent which can be installed on macOS and Windows. So much of the data we have been seeing from many solution providers is the point of view of an access point. Now with a Nyansa client agent, we can get a full picture of how clients are performing. The ability to look at this information as a third party rather than from the vendor’s point of view can sound compelling. In a way we can actually begin holding various vendors responsible for their claims or help to improve client drivers, for example. White Papers Where Nyansa can really stand out is by providing white papers containing analysis of how Wi-Fi is performing based on vendor/drivers/applications and more. Recently, Nyansa released information gathered across their client base which shows the impact of the Cisco and Apple partnership. Do we see better roaming with Apple devices because of this partnership? This is the kind of data which can create an impact in the industry. It might not be the actual direction Nyansa wants to go as a company but that type of information is at their grasp. Final Thoughts Nyansa collects a mind blowing amount of data. Where they can improve is in providing better root cause analysis to help point an operator to an actionable result. Having this amount of data at your fingertips allows someone to get detailed information into how their clients are interacting with the network and how that experience is for the user. Where Nyansa may have a missed opportunity is in analyzing different vendors, drivers and even security. We haven’t really seen Nyansa utilize AI to the extent with other vendors but there’s potential. Overall, more information collected the better but can lead to information overload if not handled properly. Links & Resources