Rowell Dionicio

Keeping Up With The Resolutions

January 7, 2019 By Rowell Leave a Comment

Every year we go through the same old motions. We recap the previous year, add up all our wins and compare it to our losses and think, what happened to my resolutions? There aren’t many people who set resolutions and there’s an even smaller percentage of people who are successful in achieving them.

Resolutions Need to be S.M.A.R.T.

Resolutions should not be vague. I’m sure you’ve heard of S.M.A.R.T. It’s a good place to start when talking about resolutions and goals. Defining resolutions should begin with the following:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Timely

Make Them Specific

I used to make vague resolutions every year. It was rarely successful in reaching them. One reason: my resolutions were too vague. There was no meat to my resolutions and I forgot about them 2 months into the year.

The first step in defining your resolution this year is to make it specific.

Here’s an example:

I’m going to get into networking

Better:

I will get my CCNA by studying every day for the next 6 months so I can be ready to take the exam and pass in June 2019 so I can be prepared to get into networking.

Make it Measurable

Goals that aren’t written down are nothing but a dream. With the example above, I started with a vague statement. It wasn’t measurable at all. When I further defined it I added a pass date of June 2019. That makes it measurable. It’s precise.

We can go further to say that each practice exam you take you want to score 80% and higher. That’s measurable success to your CCNA studies.

Is It Attainable

With a resolution now written down, read it over again and ask yourself, is this attainable? Can you commit the time and resources to achieving your resolution?

We often times make unattainable resolutions in the beginning of the year. One time I said “I’m going to get my CCIE”. Realistically, that just wasn’t going to be possible for me to do within one year. I had two young kids and was working long hours. It was far out of reach. Unattainable. Also, most people study more than a year for the CCIE.

Take another look at your resolutions to identify which ones are truly attainable this year. Can they be done in a reasonable time frame.

Is It Relevant?

Why did you make that resolution? Are you going for a certification to help you get a new job? Is it to get a raise at work? Or maybe you want to increase your technical knowledge. Whatever the reason may be, it must be relevant. You should know why you’re going after this goal to begin with. The relevance of the goal will help put your mind in the right place.

Make It Timely

A resolution should not be made without a plan. Simply saying the resolution out loud will not help you achieve success. Create a plan which outlines the steps to get to the end result.

This is where you can make an actionable step to your resolution. If we take the earlier example, getting a CCNA, what steps should be taken to get it? There’s reading, practice labs, and practice exams. Those steps can be broken down to even smaller actionable steps.

Get Going

Resolutions may be a temporary start to the new year. But it’s possible to tackle even the smallest resolutions. It takes focus and prioritization.

I’ve modified Warren Buffett’s 5/25 rule. His rule is simple: You write down your top 25 goals. Circle your top 5 goals out of the list of 25. You then focus only on the top 5.

The way I’ve done my resolutions for 2019 was to select the top 5 goals I can complete within 6 months. Now I can achieve more faster in a shorter period of time. Of course, looking at these goals they have to be S.M.A.R.T.

I have them written down and tracked. I’ll look at them regularly to see where my status is.

Here are my resolutions for the first 6 months of 2019:

Pass my CCNA Wireless with over 90% by February 1st.
Maintain a healthy eating lifestyle and lose 20 lbs by June 1st.
Create an CWNA email course on Clear To Send by March 15th.

To be honest, you won’t hit all your goals. We’re not perfect. Life happens. But with a process we can be one step closer to achieving them.

Or you can keep a simple resolution which works well for me:

Be Better Than You Were Yesterday

What Does It Mean To Be A Cisco Champion

January 4, 2019 By Rowell 2 Comments

I’ve thrown my hat into the Cisco Champion program for another year. I’m returning for 2019! I’ve been part of the program since the beginning which I believe is late 2014 or early 2015. Since then I’ve seen the program evolve.

It’s similar to being an advocate or evangelist of Cisco solutions. But I’m not required to sell my soul to Cisco. In fact, being a Cisco Champion gives me an advantage as a network engineer. While I still work on various vendor equipment, I can identify Cisco solutions more easily.

My history with network engineering started with Cisco and grew with Cisco. Which is why it’s the primary technology I work with. This is why becoming a Cisco Champion made sense.

What Does It Mean To Me

What does it mean to me, to be a Cisco Champion? It means having more engagement with different teams within Cisco. Increasing my knowledge of Cisco technologies. Which in turn allows me to deliver value to others in different forms of communications such as blogs, podcasts, etc. Additionally, it means I can provide input into Cisco’s solutions. It’s a two-way conversation.

Getting to meet Chuck Robbins at Cisco Live

Community is a big driver. The Cisco Champion program has done a phenomenal job growing a community. There’s the Cisco Champions Radio to hear about new products and to teach others as well, events during Cisco Live in which we get together, meet new people, and learn new things. We use WebEx Teams to communicate with each other and help each other out.

Attending Cisco DevNet Create in Mountain View. 2018. — Attending Cisco DevNet Create

It really has evolved from its inception.

Benefits as a Cisco Champion

There are many upsides when you’re a Cisco Champion. You get access to certain people in the business unit. They talk to you, ask you for feedback, and you provide input. There are pre-briefings for new releases and future announcements. Sometimes there are events you can attend such as Cisco DevNet Create – where I got the urge to learn programming.

At Cisco Live there are many opportunities for a Cisco Champion. You get a World of Solutions tour before it’s completely set up and get a behind the scenes look at NOC. I’ve been to the Whisper Suites and VIP Suites – which you have to follow an NDA. As a podcaster, I recorded episodes with various people for Clear To Send at the Podcast Domain. And in 2018, I had front row seats to the keynote, along with other Cisco Champions, and took a selfie with Chuck Robbins. He also hung out for a while and spoke to us which as a nice touch.

I got interviewed on theCube at DevNet Create

How To Apply

You can tell, I like being in the Cisco Champion program. You don’t have to give anything up to be in this group. You don’t have to work solely on Cisco technologies. But it does bring you closer to Cisco.

To become a Cisco Champion, every October/November you have the chance to apply. Start up your blog, publish your thoughts regularly, and join the community (could be Twitter, Facebook, whatever social media of your choice) and then head over to Cisco Champions Public – Cisco Community to be on the look out for the application window.

UniFi Adoption

November 13, 2018 By Rowell Leave a Comment

There is a strong demand for affordable enterprise-grade wireless solutions. Ubiquiti UniFi appears to be filling that need.

Ubiquiti may be well known for their point-to-point products but recently, there’s been a decline in that product line and a gigantic increase in the UniFi solution. UniFi rivals the larger enterprise wireless providers but offers it at a reasonable price.

A lower price point is enticing enough for many customers. UniFi access points are in the sub-$1k range which doesn’t break the budget.

Recently, Ubiquiti’s Q1 2019 earnings report was released and they saw an increase of 41.3% in revenue for the Enterprise technology segment. That brought the revenue up for that segment to $177.9 million. This includes UniFi, mFi, and AmpliFi products. This is a 15.1% increase in growth from Q1 2018! In Q3 2018, they grew 31.6%, to $149.5 million which was 60% of total sales!

The growth is explosive.

There’s no doubt, the UniFi management dashboard provides more than just the basics of wireless management. Ubiquiti is expanding it to become a true provider for high performing wireless networks.

UniFi’s Impact

I’m worried about poor wireless design. While UniFi may be affordable and easy to configure, it is equally easy to implement wireless incorrectly. High capacity and challenging environments need a proper wireless design to get the performance out of the investment.

The other concern is quality. I’d like to test quality of the access points for myself. Stress tests with competitive access points should also be performed. If the performance is along the same lines as other vendors then we can say UniFi is making a dent in an industry largely dominated by big vendors.

The Shift

Will we see a bigger shift in the wireless industry towards lower cost access points? Yes. I haven’t been impressed in code and hardware quality from the incumbent players. There’s plenty of room for someone to come along and cause disruption. Vendors must provide value beyond simple configuration. Attention must be spent on code quality and hardware to make a clear differentiation.

DeMISTifying Wi-Fi Issues

September 23, 2018 By Rowell Leave a Comment

Mist Systems first delivered a new way of looking at Wi-Fi at MFD2. I was impressed with their product and I continue to be impressed with the progress they’ve made since their last time at MFD.

What Mist Systems brings to the table is a way of managing Wi-Fi the way it should be in our current state of the industry and workplace. The amount of confidence in their product shows. They’re truly proud of it.

I’ve been confused about how vendors use Artificial Intelligence (AI), and I’ve never really known if they really were, but Mist definitely goes into it with their platform. And the expandability of the Mist product, the amount of data collected, and how that data can be used via the API is astounding. They give you full flexibility and autonomy of how you want to handle that data.

Confidence

Sudheer brings a lot of energy on stage. He knows the product very well and can answer any question. As he should. He exudes his energy and it feeds the room. The confidence really shines and helps sell Mist and the problems they solve. Sudheer is not afraid of saying how they’ve replaced incumbent competitors in existing environments.

Mist brings a lot of issues to light. Issues that were not seen by Meraki or Ruckus and where bubbled up as Wi-Fi issues.

One such customer they are proud of is Pet Smart. They went head-to-head with Meraki. Sudheer described Pet Smart’s attitude as skeptical as they entered into the bake off. Now they are rolling out Mist across all their stores, identifying and resolving issues quickly, and leveraging the Mist API to provide better customer experience.

Is it believable to say that Mist can really achieve all those check boxes with just a Wi-Fi solution?

With many large companies moving to Mist, there seems to be a similar story amongst all of them. These companies don’t know what’s happening on their networks. And Mist has provided an answer to their pain point that appears to be a Wi-Fi issue.

There’s another conversation that extends from that, which is if these networks were properly designed and the engineers had troubleshooting expertise, would they have needed Mist?

Then there’s the age of Mist themselves. Being less than 5 years old, how can they be trusted? That age can be deceiving. The company may be young but it’s being ran by seasoned professionals. Bob Friday co-founded Airespace and later held roles within Cisco. Sudheer Matta also held roles at Cisco within the wireless business unit.

Platform

The platform itself is another cloud managed Wi-Fi service. They’ve built it around open source technologies which I have no real expertise in critiquing.

But this platform provides a way to bring a constant stream of updates, bug fixes, and new features through their dashboard. From the controller-based Wi-Fi world, a consistent stream of updates and feature enhancements is unheard of.

Mist does this at scale with microservices. Being in the cloud world, microservices may be a simple topic but in the way I understand it this provides a way to role out updates easily and to fail fast and safe without causing global customer disruption.

API

What has me really interested in Mist is their API. Compared to Meraki’s API, you’ve got yourself a full-on toolkit at your disposal. It isn’t baked on top of a product.

The API was developed alongside the product. What’s really surprising to me is some customers opt to build their own dashboards and skip Mist’s altogether.

The Mist API is extensive and can cater to a novice or seasoned professional. If there’s specific data you’re looking to use, manipulate, or analyze, you can do it with the Mist API.

Artificial Intelligence

Mist is going all in with Marvis, their AI-driven Virtual Network Assistant (VNA). Marvis, which draws similar ties to Iron Man’s Jarvis. When it comes to AI, we would need a system that would perform functions that normally require human intelligence and inspection. Marvis is the AI that will help look up issues for you, perform anomaly detection, faster root cause analysis and real-time changes through RRM.

Some of the ways Marvis can be utilized by IT teams is to ask it simple questions such as:

“Unhappy users at site office”
“Troubleshoot site office production”
“List client events yesterday”

There’s so much trust that goes into Marvis that the Mist support team uses Marvis for troubleshooting with any client tickets that come in. They eat their own dog food. As a result, Marvis brings up a lot of data for correlation and provides enough to make it actionable.

Future of Mist

How bright is Mist’s future? What concerns me with being cloud-based, gathering immense amount of data that has to be analyzed for AI and Machine Learning, is how will this amount of data impact Mist financially? Cloud is great for enterprises and we know the benefits. Big Data in the cloud can get expensive. Will we ever see an on-premise solution for even the biggest customers? Who knows.

From what I can gather, Mist is not for those looking for a single vendor stack. Mist doesn’t have a switch, router, or firewall. But what they do have is a way for you to leverage API to work with their partners, Palo Alto Networks and Juniper. Mist doesn’t want to be a jack of all trades, master of none. They stick to what they know and do it well.

Python Day 4: Dictionaries

September 23, 2018 By Rowell Leave a Comment

Dictionaries

Indexes for dictionaries are called keys. Keys are associated with a value called a key-value pair. A dictionary is unordered. Compared to a List, there is no index starting at 0.

Dictionaries are typed with braces {}. To assign a dictionary to the client1 variable:

client1 = {'rssi': -52, 'channel': 36, 'noise': -96, 'tx rate': 600, 'mcs': 9}

The keys within this dictionary are rssi, channel, noise, tx rate, and mcs. The values for those keys are -52, 36, 96, 600, and 9, respectively.

To access a value through a key it is performed by:

client1[‘channel’]
36

Trying to call a key that doesn’t exist in the dictionary will result in a KeyError error message.

client1['bssid']
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in 
KeyError: 'bssid'

With methods, values can be returned from a dictionary. Let’s say I want to print out the key and value of client1. I’ll use a for-loop to iterate through each of the key-value pairs and print them out using the items() method.

for i in client1.items():
print(i)
('rssi', -52)
('channel', 36)
('noise', -96)
('tx rate', 600)
('mcs', 9)

If we just needed to print out the keys we would use the keys() method. Again, I’ll use the for-loop to iterate through the keys and print them out:

for k in client1.keys():
print(k)
rssi
channel
noise
tx rate
mcs

If we wanted just the values we can do the same for-loop but call the values() method:

for v in client1.values():
print(v)
-52
36
-96
600
9