It’s been five months since I passed the JNCIA-MistAI, and one month since I started using Mist with access points actually “claimed” (Mist terminology for registering an AP in your organization or site) and deployed, and to anyone thinking of going for the cert, my advice is to do it the opposite way; get the experience on Mist portal, then do the cert.
I completed the exam in July as I needed a non-CWNP cert as part of my application for the CWNE. Our campus is mainly Aruba, and I had bought the textbook to go for the HPE Aruba Networking Certified Associate – Campus Access, but when I saw that it required further investment of at least $300 on online labs, and our dept started talking about moving to Mist (which we’ve now deployed in one building, three floors with 50+ APs at time of writing), it seemed like a no brainer to go for the JNCIA cert instead.
The fact that the Juniper course material is free sealed the deal. There are two options for this, either open a free account on manage.mist.com and study the materials there (be aware that they cover JNCIS material as well, and there’s little indication of what is and isn’t relevant to the JNCIA alone), or open an account with the Juniper Learning Portal, and use their dedicated JNCIA-MistAI course, which had everything I needed to pass, after going through the videos at least twice.
To open an account on the learning portal, you’ll need to be a Juniper customer, i.e. with access to a serial number from a Juniper device, which I took from a spare switch we had in the office. As I stated before, all you need is in the Juniper Learning Portal videos and practice tests. Note there are two practice tests, the first is a voucher assessment test at the end of the video course, where you get three attempts to pass with 70% or above, and that’ll give you a discount which is significantly lower than the full exam cost. The other practice test is available when you search for MistAI and you should find it in the first few results.
You can use your account on manage.mist.com to simulate the lessons you’ll learn in the course. At the time I did the exam I did not have access to any Mist devices, APs, switches, etc. I could only view the tabs with empty information, and it definitely would have made more sense with proper input on the Marvis or the Monitor tabs for example.
I’ve used AOS8 since late 2020, and I’ve found that the Airwave / Glass interfaces generally work well and are easy to navigate. I had hoped for more of the same from Mist, and it doesn’t disappoint for the sheer volume of information gathered. Here are a few pros and cons so far:
The Monitor > Service Levels / Alerts tabs are exactly what we need in our environment, not least for quickly seeing how many people are using the different SSIDs, what issues they’re experiencing and where.
The ability of Mist to recognise third party switches via LLDP is very useful, and hopefully with the HPE acquisition of Juniper, it won’t be long before we see Aruba device management integrated into Mist.
Marvis is also excellent at catching issues such as down APs or bad ethernet connections, before users have a chance to report them. This helps us significantly in diagnosing and prioritising issues as they’re reported to our ServiceDesk.
In Airwave/Glass, you can go via VisualRF to the overall map of sites, and drill down to the building, then floor, to eventually view APs. But in Mist, when we go to Location>Live View, each map is separate, there’s no option to connect or move between floors of the same building, and therefore see the overall building WiFi “health”, e.g. number of APs up/down.
In terms of heatmaps, I would also like to see a connection between outdoor and indoor APs. In Airwave, I have a separate map for all the outdoor APs on our campus, but there’s no way to show the effect of their signal on the interior coverage of nearby buildings. Hopefully Mist will incorporate this in the near future, so we can see how much the RF bleed from outdoor APs helps indoor environments, and vice versa.
There is an unusual element in Mist which I have not seen in Airwave or DNAC and it occurs when searching via BSSID. When I ask a user to open command prompt and run “netsh wlan show interface” to report the BSSID, if I search for it in Airwave/DNAC, I get a result straight away for the correct SSID and AP, as expected. In Mist however, if you search for this in the Access Points tab, you get nothing. Through trial and error I found that you have to remove the last hexadecimal digit from the 6th octet, so for example instead of searching for 70:90:41:12:34:56, you enter 70:90:41:12:34:5. This will then give you the AP name and MAC address, either of which you can use to search in Clients > WiFi Clients. In the list of clients that is then shown, click on the BSSID column to show the list of BSSIDs, which will include the full one reported to you by the user. It’s more complicated than it needs to be, given you have to search both the Access Point and Client tabs to eventually verify the BSSID.
Overall, there’s room for development, but the cloud-based Mist is a great improvement over the likes of AOS and DNAC, and I look forward to working towards the JNCIS (and possibly JNCIP) Mist certs in the not-too-distant future.
Applied WiFi 