“Thirteen hundred APs, no open support tickets,” Sudheer Matta, VP of Products for Mist Systems, boldly stated during his MFD3 presentation. At the time, he was referencing one of their largest customers specifically, but the company’s desire to prevent bugs, create high quality customer experiences, and resolve issues quickly were principles that permeated the discussions with Mobility Field Day delegates.
Mist leverages several key components in order to pull off their customer focused reliability, visibility, and proactive troubleshooting of the wireless network.
Cloud-based micro-services architecture. This modern approach to building systems is part and parcel of what many cloud companies have been doing with their software architecture over the last few years. Instantiating distributed services and leveraging APIs between these services is foundational to providing the kind of resiliency and redundancy cloud makes possible and Mist credits this architecture with how they are able to push out new features, fixes, and services weekly without causing any data plane outages for customers.
In his presentation, Sudheer shares an impressive case of how Mist was able to do a complete restore for a customer that had deleted their entire controller infrastructure. All the controllers and services were back online in less than 2 hrs with no access point reboots or data plane outages, a feat Sudheer also credits to Mist’s distributed architectural approach.
Analytics. These days collecting data is table stakes, the real advancement is in building better algorithms that provide useful information to customers. Mist calls these, “actionable insights” and they are more than just increasing the noise floor with more alerts. Mist believes their actionable insights are so dead on that they’ve announced proactive anomaly detection, meaning the system will open a ticket on your behalf when an issue is detected.
And the analytics don’t stop with just ticket opening – MARVIS (Mist’s AI) is getting several feature enhancements focused on improving the troubleshooting process, reducing analysis time, and improving RRM.
A culture of attention to detail. After watching Mist’s MDF3 presentations, I would describe their business model as “just good enough is not good enough for us.”
Besides a distributed architecture designed to minimized the number of bugs and the impact of those bugs that do make it into the system, issues are expected to be resolved quickly and not allowed to fester or be ignored. A clear emphasis is placed on quality and usability of the system, from the architecture to the user experience.
Mist is also listening both to its customer base as well as wireless engineers. An improved adapter bracket, the transparency with firmware version issues, the coming soon red and green buttons, and the constant tuning of the virtual assistant were just a few indicators from the presentations that customer experience and usability not only matter, but are at the top of the priority list.
For more Mist goodness, be sure to check out these posts:
@rowelldionicio – Demistifying Wi-Fi Issues
@Drew_CM – Mist Enhances Machine Learning Capabilities To Improve WLAN Performance, Troubleshooting
Disclaimer: While Mobility Field Day, which is sponsored by the companies that present, was very generous to invite me to the fantastic MDF3 event and I am very grateful for it, my opinions are totally my own, as all redheads are far too stubborn to have it any other way.
Published 10/7/2018
Amy Engineer 
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