On Friday after finishing my breakfast and coffee when I logged into my work and noticed that everything was moving at a slow pace. Websites were slow to load, OneDrive access was slow, my Slack and MS Teams was running slow. Initially, I did not pay much attention as I was busy responding to some emails and getting tasks done. It got to the point, that this slowness started to hinder my work. My first thought was is it my Wi-Fi, but it could not have been the Wi-Fi because my Macbook is connected to a dock and I have an Ethernet cable connected to it. After some basic ping tests to my gateway and external IP’s and checking my Wi-Fi using WiFi Signal, I decided to ask Marvis.
Looking at the wireless metrics in the dashboard after I logged in clearly showed me that there are issues with the throughput. NOTE: I could have used this screen to further drill down into the issues but decided to go with the Marvis route first.
Using the Marvis’ Natural language query I asked a question about a client, since I did not specify the client it asked me to specify which client. I picked my iPhone.
This is the response I received from Marvis. It showed issues with the AP uptime and Throughput as the two issues. But if you look carefully, under Throughput it is clearly in bold letters showing that “limited WAN throughput”. So let’s dig into that.
On the right there is a button “INVESTIGATE”. Once I clicked it, I was presented with the following screen
I picked the the first option, “Service Levels”. As you can see that the Goal is set to 10 Mbps But the throughput was below that. Going back to the initial assessment Marvis presented with, this makes sense because there certainly is an issue with the WAN connectivity.
Looking at the next SLE, “Classifiers”. It is pointing at the network as well, however, it is not very clear here because unfortunately I do not have full Juniper network. Having Junipers WAN assurance and SRX provides additional capabilities to drill down into such issues. One of these days if I can get my hands on a Juniper firewall and I am able to run a 100% Juniper network in my lab I’d love to display additional troubleshooting steps.
This whole process took may be 2 or 3 min. I decided to reboot my Comcast Cable modem. Took about 3 to 5 min for the whole reboot process including my Mist AP43’s to connect back to the cloud, I was back online and working with no further throughput issues in 5 to 8 min. My ping times and traceroutes were showing good results and no further packet loss. All websites were loading normally, OneDrive was back in action, Zoom, Slack, MS Teams all apps were functional.
