Background

When working with networking vendors in this day and age, AI and ML are terms that are thrown around as features that add value to your team by proactively monitoring and alerting you of interesting or problematic things that may unknowingly exist in your environment. At face value, that sounds great! You don’t have to constantly check your network for issues because the system will bubble them up for you. And in an environment with close to 310,000 APs across multiple orgs and sites, it’s pretty much table stakes. The good news is that I’ve seen this work, as long as you’re checking those alerts because today, these systems will most likely alert, but not automatically remediate any of its findings. The remediation process still requires human intervention in most cases. However, what happens if the vendor’s AI/ML solution isn’t trained to find something in your environment that it should or something that you might be interested in looking at? That’s where knowing how to code and also work with APIs really comes in handy these days. I’m going to walk you through two different scenarios where writing my own code to leverage one of our WLAN vendor’s APIs led to insightful discoveries in our environment to help find a few needles in a massive haystack. One of the scenarios even led to the vendor implementing their own proactive checks into the platform which has sparked an auto RMA process for us.

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