The company boldly laid out a mobile-first vision to cut the cord and exploit wireless technology in every corner of the company’s operations, in order to improve employee productivity and reduce operating costs. The management team recognized that employees did not want to be tethered to their desks, and wanted the ability to conduct business on the move with laptops, tablets and phones. In addition, the company wanted to embrace the BYOD movement without relinquishing the quality of communications used for business transactions.
This ambitious mobile-first strategy did not come without challenges. The company realized that Wi-Fi would now be the primary access to the network, and its reliability and quality had to match that of the wired network. The company was moving both voice and data to Wi-Fi, so client Wi-Fi performance would need to be monitored closely. The IT team wanted a way to measure Wi-Fi performance against service level agreement (SLA) metrics so they could report on the quality of the network. Traditional network management and WLAN monitoring tools offered little capability in this area. Furthermore, the IT team wanted to shift from a reactive to a proactive method of addressing issues. They hoped that by measuring performance against SLA targets, they could detect performance degradation and network issues before the end-users would, thereby giving them time to look at historical trends and drill down to isolate whether the problems were affecting an entire section of the network or a subset of particular clients. The goal was to identify and fix issues before someone called to complain.