 I want to do a quick overview video of using Unify as an MSP. So if you're not familiar with managed share providing, it means we take an active role in the technology of our clients, making sure everything's up to date, making sure everything works, making sure they have all the latest firmware and connectivity and being able to be the outside IT ready at a moment's notice with all the information when they call us and say, hey, this isn't working. I need you to start troubleshooting that. So that's what kind of brought up this video was I've done all kinds of how to set up the Unifies and how we deploy the Unifies and that we run a self-hosted controller. But this is the troubleshooting side of it. I wanted to talk about how we actually use it to figure out problems that clients are having and kind of deal with those issues. Now, what we're dealing with right now is this is our self-hosted instance of the Unify controller and I want to answer a question that comes up almost every time I do any video related to Unify. The question is if the client loses connectivity between us and between our systems and their systems, what happens to the Wi-Fi units quit working? No, they don't. We just lose data feed. So when we deploy these, they feed the data back to our controller. So we have this cool dashboard and statistics and information in our controller gathering data all the time and logging it. But if this, for some reason, there's a gap in connectivity between us and them for whatever litany of reasons, it doesn't hurt anything. It just loses a little bit of data between there because there's not any way to, there's nowhere to send the data. And this client is an example and I wanted to start with a basic example of a client that only has a couple Wi-Fi units. They have all kinds of like other networking gear that's not Unify that they had installed when we took them over as a client, but they don't have anything Unify except for the Wi-Fi and that's perfectly fine. We support a lot of in place installs based on whatever was often there when we took over the client but they wanted good Wi-Fi and Unify was a solution. So we deployed them to basic APLRs, actually deployed them quite a while ago. They've had them running for a quite a long time and they're not even the five gigahertz ones. Like I said, these are older models that we put in quite a while ago. So we're looking right now and we can see what devices are connected. Now, we're going to start over here at the devices and we've got two of them. We got one in the office and one in the shop area, a manufacturing type client. So this is common. And actually I just brought that up too because I upgraded to the latest firmware for them and so I just did that about 10 minutes ago so you can see the uptime. I did this one and this one. This is the first nice thing about Unify. Real easy to just push the firmware out as the updates come available on ours. So we can go through. They're a managed client. We manage all their systems including when firmware updates are for their Wi-Fi. So this is something that makes it real easy to do and we can do this for all the different sites and up here in the top that I got blurred out. We just hit this and it pulls up the whole list of all of our clients and we can jump to any site and do the same thing for any of them. So it makes it real easy when the call comes in from a client. Hey, I'm having trouble with. We've got the client name. We go to the site. We can start looking at things. And we're going to go over here and we'll look at the map. This is something I really like. So I showed the devices but now you want to know what are they connected to in a visual reference. This scales up and gets... I'm not going to say messy but it's definitely interesting to look at this top the topology map which changes in real time. So if they move and they walk from the office to the shop area if Mike goes from the office shop area you'll actually just watch Mike's phone jump over to the shop one and then jump back over to this one when he goes back in the office the system roams between them. This is a really nice feature of Unify and it takes only a few minutes from when he does it to the map updating in real time. So I can just leave this here statically and it will show the movements. Let me actually zoom in so you can see a little better. And I like how you do this in highlights. Now if they have all the Unify equipment and I've done videos on what a full Unify deployment looks like I think I have an in-depth video you can find in my Unify series. It shows you when you stack together router switches and everything that it follows through all the way but this client in particular has open... has a different router for the hen and everything else that's not Unify so we're just seeing this here. And I think one of them just moved. I was looking at the website. Anyways, we can see someone's connected his guest over just an iPhone. We have the laptop, laptop and all on the MPD network and this is the MPD guest network. Now, we go over here to the settings and let's say this client wanted to change something like their wireless. I can hit edit. I change whatever they want me to change. The password is usually what they want changed because you know someone left someone something happened at the company something changed. No problem. I just type in a new password. It pushes out to their devices. So we go back over here to devices which are right here and done. It just pushes out the settings to all of them whether they have two or 200 devices. It just pushes the same settings out all over their network. Even if the network has is spread across multiple buildings. We have some clients like this that have multiple locations geographically separate locations. We have one that's even out of state locations but we keep them all in one dashboard and what they like is their Wi-Fi when they log in or walk into their office in Michigan Detroit or they go all the way down south through their offices. The Wi-Fi is the same and their devices just connect and we can see where they're connected. So when we're looking at the map we actually have extra names and some of them to denote the physical location of them which is really handy so you can see when they're connected and if they start saying I'm having trouble connecting and we know what company they're from it doesn't matter what state they're in we can start digging into their device and when you dig into the client devices themselves their search is here you can look at who's connected it even puts a little green leaf in case they're using the power save mode which is kind of cool some of the iPhone support that you can block them reconnect them so you can block problem people jump into some of the details for how they're connected how long they've been connected and what data speeds you're connecting at. So this is just some of those little insights that you can have. So right here is this device it's how it's connected statistics or even a history of each time this device connected based on the 30 days of history we keep for this client and if we wanted to change things like if we had a Unify router in there we could actually at this point also assign an alias a name and even a IP address to this this client doesn't have the Unify router like I said so we have to do that in the actual router for the DHCP reservations but Unify makes this really simple to do and really simple to see and kind of troubleshoot and connect what's going on it also this is an important thing that we have here neighboring access points this is just in the last hour for access points that are on there you can see people having Wi-Fi hotspots or whatever because of the area they're in there's quite a few things and this kind of helps you get the troubleshooting for all right this thing is clearly which is probably just an HP printer too close to one of the devices and it's broadcasting the nearest the office one or near a shop so this tells you where those the devices the cells the Unify devices can see and then it tells you what Wi-Fi they're next to once again not a troubleshooting thing the other troubleshooting thing that Unify will give you that's really clever is you're going to be able to see if someone does a rogue AP and what that is if you're not familiar with like the Wi-Fi pineapple the Wi-Fi pineapple is a device that will look at someone's AP whatever they call it this one's called MPD and it'll repeat the MPD and try to get clients to connect to it so people will start trying to log in a fake network you actually get alert from Unify that's called rogue AP and that means someone's trying to emulate your AP I also have some alerts down here and we get these as emails so we're able to address them that way and you can see these historically and these are all from what just April and things like that so I haven't cleared them and I had archive all but I left them up so you can see what the alerts look like we get these actually notified as emails so we address them in real time that way for each system and these were actually some power outages that happened on 421, 410 and obviously they both get disconnect at the same time so if anything changes in status we get a notice for when the connects and disconnects are they go to an alerts system we have so we can start troubleshooting if need be with the client and contact them and get things sorted out turns out like I said couple storms we had and random outages that were they were dealing within our area cool thing about that too if you're trying to detect patterns you can put these errors the disconnect errors on this little all they do is click here and put it on a map so you can kind of see the patterns of problems also handy when you have that statistic for the client to be able to go right away they're like I'm having all of these problems I'm like we had a problem on Tuesday you had a problem last month let's let's you know we're dealing with facts that are at your hands immediately which is great I really like that about the way the unified system works so you can really dig into things it also has this events list that you can do which is just above the alerts just for things going on in a network so you can start saying you know WLAN stuff general notices for things disconnecting it gives you a lot of insight into the client network now I'm going to switch over to another network real quick and this network has no land devices they don't need to switch this is just a small salon that we provide a single Wi-Fi device for but you get the same things except for they also have a router they were having some router problems we talked them into getting a unified router because it gives us better insight into their network and they were these unified usgs are great for small businesses like this so we have the unified usg and it goes right to a WLAN because all they really want to do is provide access to the handful of things they have being a salon they don't really have a lot of devices connected to their network so they have a guest network for the people and patrons of the salon and they have a secured network for the few people that are there and what's nice is you get this dashboard when you have everything plugged in of course more if you have the land plugged in and we can see the thorough put we can see the speed and what's going on in real time so if someone's pulling up too much data we're able to see that so once again this gives us a little bit more insight into their network if need be if they have this deployment and that's what a lot of this is about is being able to really quickly jump into a client and say alright this is what we're dealing with this is some of the stats so when they call we can just log into our dashboard and start jumping to the client and especially if they say my internet's down and we can see already yeah we already know we got the alert we're working on it we're going to contact who needs to be done and this is something why I like as an msp unify under dashboards being able to troubleshoot these things very quickly and I'm a dig real quick in to show you our network where I can show you more stuff as many of you know from my videos we run pf sense at the head end of our network but this is kind of cool because when you look at the devices here you can see our we just use an 8 port switch for an IT company we actually don't have a ton of things so much of our stuff is virtual so I don't have a big unify switch we might move to one more so I can do some more videos some more testing for a lab purposes but the port switch actually does perfectly fine for our office and what's neat about it is this is that fun thing when we're going to go here to map and look at topology now it's drawn properly so we can see what's connected to which network I know this one's my phone some only one here in the office it's really in the morning here's all the different boxes connected to the switch right now that are on and live so same thing I can see which switch port to plugged into I think when you have a bunch of virtual machines plugged into one switch port by the way they all show up on one switch port or if you have a managed switch and a dumb switch it only sees all the devices but things are all plugged into the same port but this is also really handy when you're troubleshooting and looking at things that are fully deployed with unify because then you can dig in and say all right this is what's plugged into that port actually I got one more client and pull up here this is a new client we're building out and we can see they have just a couple things 48 port PoE switch that's hooked up to another 48 port switch and we have some Wi-Fi devices on there now this is also where unify can be very helpful to bring it over here to the devices we're going to go over to the PoE switch we can see what's plugged into there what's plugged into the ports which right now is just the three Wi-Fi units we have this one this one and this one they're plugged in their PoE now this is where it's kind of cool we can actually restart the units power them off or restart the switch in total or just one single port and reset this Wi-Fi device this site's not fully deployed yet so the Wi-Fi's are less cleverly named Wi-Fi 1, 2, and 3 they're actually going to be named with the locations are at everything's just kind of set up there but not finalized so this site is kind of a work in progress we have it deployed because they needed to do some Wi-Fi testing there and making sure everything works as the building gets built out this is that infrastructure project if you follow the channel that we've been working on but this is kind of nice I can restart the device but let's say the device itself isn't connected for some reason I can then repower that port and the reason we have a 48-port PoE and this is the one I recently did a review on is we're plugging in a whole lot of cameras and this is the same thing we're going to be able to see connectivity lights and everything on there and this is what's important when you're doing let me get my head out of the way so you can see this better this is what is important is that you're able to really dive in and understand what's going on at a client and being able to see what's plugged in each port and being able to do that right from the desk while you're on the phone with the client to start troubleshooting and sorting out a problem for them is immensely handy and one of the reasons as an MSP we really like the unified system it gives us that instant insight call the client switch to the client and start taking in things it's funny because there's a lot of alerts on here because if someone caught my joke that I had posted or talked about this on I think the last walkthrough they don't have that they've run where everything's running off an extension cord right now because that's all that's available to us because the electricity we have the rack mount in there but the electricity is not done so we actually have the alerts mostly turned off on this client because it keeps getting restarted so much so I kind of turned off the alerts until the client comes fully deployed so it's full of warnings because everything gets disconnected because they keep powering things off as they trip over extension cords in the room that they're supposed to be finishing for us but they need Wi-Fi holding their story there but this is one of those things we can get that insight you can see that there's really nothing else plugged in it's also handy to know when someone plugged things in so you can have it set alerts for events like that say alright I want to know when someone plugs things in because one of the worst things to troubleshoot is when you are the manager's provider and then they let their friend come and help them with something we are not sure what inspires people to do these things but occasionally they do and this is where you can get insight going no no no there's something plugged in that we didn't do someone set up another AP because I thought they were clever and would do something like that and this is where Unifice helps troubleshoot that you know giving you that extra insight they have anything helpful and give you just kind of a quick overview of how we're looking at sites and how we're able to see things very quickly with Unify and why that helps us as an MSP and we use other software besides Unify but this kind of looks at the physical layer and helps us fix things it also like I said makes it really easy they have three Wi-Fies if I need to change their settings or anything on the passwords or the Wi-Fi and just go to wireless networks edit I change it it instantly sends it out these are just handy handy tools so anytime we can get service faster without leaving my desk life is easier for all of us when we can do that the clients happy because they got their password changed like in an immediate nature we're happy because we're able to you know quickly get something deployed for the client so everybody wins and having this self-hosted controller means we have an easy access to all this we have a lot of you know capabilities for pushing all this and getting insights into the network all right hopefully this was helpful and I'll be doing more Unify videos about more specific tasks coming up in a future because they they just keep plugging away and keep coming up with new things so there's always more to talk about thank you for watching if you like this video go ahead and give us a thumbs up if you have some feedback leave it in the comments below if you'd like to subscribe to our channel hit that subscribe button hit the bell icon to let YouTube know you'd like to know about new releases on videos you can also find new releases 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