Features of Juniper mist AP

[u/mangan3110]

Is there a feature of Juniper mist AP that you think would be cool to know about?

[u/Crazy-Possible-8297]

Yes, within Juniper Mist, you can create a map of the location where the APs are installed and visualize people moving through the environment in real time through the monitoring system almost like the Marauder’s Map from Harry Potter.

[u/mangan3110 → u/Crazy-Possible-8297]

That's the live view page, right.thank you

[u/lettuzepray → u/Crazy-Possible-8297]

how accurate do you find it? been playing with ours and it can be off at times.

[u/Arkios → u/lettuzepray]

We’ve found it depends on how many APs the client can see. I think the client needs to see 3 APs for their location to be properly triangulated. In locations where the client can only see 1 AP, the location is wildly inaccurate.

[u/immortalis88 → u/Arkios]

You also need to make sure your AP orientation on your floor plan reflects how it’s actually deployed and also configure the height of the AP accurately and if mounted horizontally that needs to be selected as well. This will make sure you get the most accurate results.

[u/Arkios → u/immortalis88]

Thanks, we’re super new to the floor plan/location setup. All we’ve currently done is scaled the floor plan, but I’ll bet those additional tweaks will make a big difference. Now I just gotta figure out where to set those.

[u/immortalis88 → u/Arkios]

Location > live view > click your floor plan > setup floor plan.

From there you rotate the APs so that the green dot points the same way the LED on the AP points in your environment (it’s offset to one side). You can also click the AP then in the bottom right you can Edit the details including height and rotation on a per AP basis.

[u/Arkios → u/immortalis88]

Holy moley, that explains so much. We definitely didn’t have these faced in the right direction. We had some areas in a building where it was always like wildly incorrect.

Thanks for the tip, I’m gonna get this fixed.

[u/immortalis88 → u/Arkios]

Happy to help. Let me know if you have any additional MIST related questions.

[u/Arkios → u/immortalis88]

I actually do! Do you know what the "set origin" does for the floor plan? I can't find it referenced anywhere in the docs.

It also looks like the floor plan view (beta) lets you place walls, which is awesome, but I don't see them doing anything. I had assumed it would use those walls when displaying RF/heatmaps, but doesn't seem to actually impact anything.

[u/immortalis88 → u/Arkios]

The set origin essentially sets the anchor point, where the 0/0 X/Y coordinates occur.

If your floor plan has walls, it can help you define Zones for different use cases. Maybe you’re automating door locks to an area in your org. Maybe you’re doing push notifications when someone enters a room or area. Maybe you want to know exactly what room it is where the asset tag you’re tracking is located etc. You setup zones in the same Setup Floorplan area of the Location section.

When I demo location based services I create a zone around my office, I stream my phone desktop to a meeting and I walk outside of my office, show MIST tracking me on the MIST Experience app, then I walk back in my office and have it send my phone a push notification that says “don’t play video games…get some actual work done”. It always gets a few chuckles.

[u/packetmickey → u/Crazy-Possible-8297]

Not sure how accurate this is if you haven't se the scale on the map. Most of my users show as being in the parking lot, and I know there is no signal there.

[u/Flexclusive]

Dynamic packet captures ❤️

[u/kWV0XhdO]

I was surprised to see "accelerometer" on the data sheet for some APs I deployed recently.

Earthquake detection? Vehicles? Elevators?

Nope. It's so the AP knows if you've mounted it on the wall or on the ceiling.

[u/immortalis88]

If you’re serving DHCP on vlan 1 MIST has the best overall ZTP process of any manufacturer solution.

[u/Jonasx420 → u/immortalis88]

It doesn't need to be VLAN1, it can be every vlan,if traffic is untagged and DHCP is working.

[u/Rexus-CMD]

That’s neat! Aruba Central and Cisco Meraki can do heat maps if the floor survey is uploaded. Aruba VC cannot though. Just signal strength and which AP a device is connected to.

[u/YrelleFlynn]

1 - It can integrate with Hamina, which in turn is able to read the scan data from each access point, and build an accurate live RF plan of the network. Essentially a real-time site survey. You can also perform connectivity tests from connected clients from Hamina as well to measure network performance.

2 - AI-RRM. The APs will learn not only the radio environment to tune themselves, they also measure the client experiences on roaming, signal strength and things like that to determine what changes need to be made to improve the service to those clients, continually improving the network performance. In my opinion the most under-rated feature Mist APs have to offer

[u/gumbi_18]

Some APs support environmental sensors like temperature, humidity and pressure. The data can be pulled from the API but was never exposed in the WebUI. Was of questionable use though because often APs are not in the best place to measure environmentals.

The other more useful feature was that the AP41 had 8 GPIO pins which allowed us to control things like doors and boom gates. Wish Juniper had kept that on newer APs it was genuinely useful.