The assistant Vloka works with.
Vloka supports the management of your wireless: access points and controllers. The assistant comes from KIDJO·AI6, a product of its own — it answers from what this appliance measured, on your own kit, checked before you see it.
What KIDJO·AI6 is
KIDJO·AI6 is an assistant that answers questions about your wireless from your own appliance's data. A product in its own right, with its own services around it.
On terms Vloka can hold it to. It runs in the appliance itself or on a server of your own beside it, it answers only from what this appliance measured, and every answer is checked before you see it. Your questions, your logs and your client data stay under your own supervision, inside your own domain. Included with every paid edition.
What it makes better
- Vloka already has the data, on its own screens — the trick is knowing which of the forty to open. You do not have to: you ask in your own words, and one answer comes back, put together from every screen that had a piece of it.
- Every answer is checked before you see it. Each MAC address, IP address, time, version and channel number has to be traceable to something Vloka actually read; what is not does not get through. No human reviewing it, and deliberately no second model — a model checking a model is not a check.
How the two work together
Vloka supplies the facts and the tools: what it measured, and what it is allowed to do with it. KIDJO·AI6 supplies the language. The line between them is the same line as everywhere else in this product — Vloka stays the source, so an answer and the dashboard come out of the same data and say the same thing.
The whole story about KIDJO·AI6 itself — including KIDJO·AI6 SKY, the hosted one, which is a separate product again — lives at kidjo.nl: told once, where it belongs.
KIDJO·AI6’s added value to Vloka
A new SSID. A new VLAN on the controller. A controller that has just arrived and has to be set up. Vloka reads, checks and explains — but the configuration for that is work, and it is where this pays off.
- KIDJO·AI6's lab. A 9800 that is not yours: a controller an administrator has marked as the lab, on the same software version as the one it is writing for. It is where KIDJO·AI6 practises, and it is the only place it is allowed to write by itself — without that mark, nothing goes on the wire at all.
- It is tried there, not on you. The change is run on that lab controller and read back from it: what changed in its running configuration is counted, line by line, before and after. You are shown that result next to the commands — which box took them, when, and what it made of them. A change that has not run there is not put in front of you at all.
- And at one press it carries it out. The same route the screen takes and in the audit log; on your controller through the same four conditions as everything else: you asked for it, you saw the exact lines, you agreed, and it is recorded (see What it does).
- Troubleshooting does not stop at the finding. It looks for the way out, and where that is a change it prepares that change the same way.
- You can watch it work. Every line it sent to a lab controller is on screen with the literal output, and what changed is counted from the configuration before and after — "applied" is a claim, two lines added is evidence.
Why it has a lab of its own
- Because an assistant only gets good by getting it wrong first, and that must not happen on somebody's network. The boundary is in the code, not in an intention: it may write to a controller carrying the lab flag and to no other.
- What it does there: try a change, read back what the box made of it, and count the difference between the configuration before and after. And it does that on the versions customers actually run — newer, the same, and older side by side — so a command that reads differently on another release comes out there.
- What it is worth: your controller is not the practice ground, and what goes wrong there becomes a correction in the software instead of an incident at a customer.
That is what you are buying: the configuration somebody would otherwise work out on your network, worked out somewhere it costs nothing first — and the question answered without you having to translate it into a screen.