Arista Wi-Fi Services REST API Documentation

CV-CUE (CloudVision Cognitive Unified Edge) is powered by a cognitive management plane which simplifies configuration and troubleshooting while delivering richer telemetry to network administrators.

• A Centralized Management Plane remarkably simplifies policy management and provisioning of Wi-Fi networks.
• A Flexible Data Plane allows wireless access points to provide customizable traffic redirection at the edge of the network.
• A Distributed Control Plane enables enterprise Wi-Fi features without the scalability issues of older architectures, and
• An Innovative Cognition Plane with streaming telemetry automates Wi-Fi network monitoring and troubleshooting to optimize the Wi-Fi user experience and minimize the mean time to resolution (MTTR) for network access and performance issues.

The Arista Wi-Fi Services collectively form the centralized management plane for CV-CUE. All the Arista Wi-Fi Services expose REST APIs for developers to deeply integrate with the Arista Wi-Fi Services and help them create custom and unique integrations.

LaunchPad (LP)

LaunchPad (LP) is a cloud-hosted service managed by Arista Networks. It enables single sign-on for Arista Wi-Fi customers to access all the available Wi-Fi services associated with the customer’s account. LP also provides the customer with a rich interface to centrally manage users and API keys (for both UI and programmatic API access) that can be used to access all the Wi-Fi services.

Wireless Manager and CV-CUE

The Wireless Manager (WM) service enables the customer to centrally manage the Wi-Fi network and its security via the CloudVision Cognitive Unified Edge (CV-CUE) UI. CV-CUE supports the following workflows:

• Wi-Fi Device management - Get real time insights into the wireless network at any given location or around any Wireless device.
• Location and Layouts management - Organize the Access points in a hierarchical location tree to view and manage your wireless deployment with ease and track precise locations of Wi-Fi APs and clients on a floor.
• Configuration management - Intuitive and location based device configuration workflows allowing a centralized and simple management of the wireless infrastructure.
• WIPS - Enables surgical over-the-air intrusion prevention, and automatic and accurate creation of alerts and classification of wireless threats.
• Wi-Fi Network Analytics - Gather data based on Wi-Fi device MAC addresses collected from Probe Requests, content analytics and application visibility based on Wi-Fi connections, and engagement analytics based on Wi-Fi users who opt in and choose to share their personal information.
• Wireless network troubleshooting - Various features like the Root cause analysis Engine, Single client inference, the automatic packet captures, client emulations by 3rd radio and many more enable precise Wi-Fi troubleshooting.
• Network baselining - Using ML algorithms on the data it collects, CV-CUE baselines network behavior and automatically detects and highlights anomalies. Baselining is done for connection failures, RF performance KPIs and application QoE. When necessary, CV-CUE finetunes the Wi-Fi network to optimize the user experience and provides recommendations to resolve network problems.
• Reporting- Generate scheduled and on-demand for compliance with PCI DSS audits and other compliance requirements.

Apart from the CV-CUE UI, WM exposes all these functionalities via a large suite of REST APIs. These APIs allow developers to integrate their systems with the WM and leverage Arista’s programmable wireless network capabilities.

WM has two deployment variants,

• On-Premise deployments - WM is deployed as a standalone service in a customer’s private network.
• Cloud deployments - WM is deployed in cloud along with all other Arista services.

Learn more about CV-CUE and the Arista Wi-Fi services.

Guest Manager (GM)

Guest Manager (GM) is a cloud-hosted service managed by Arista Networks. It enables Arista Wi-Fi customers to provision guest access to the Internet through customized captive portals. GM also enables Arista Wi-Fi customers analyze the various stats and demographic profiles of guest users who access the Wi-Fi network. GM integrates with Wireless Manager (WM) to enable captive portal redirection. It also fetches visibility and association information from the WM for guest analytics.

GM provides the following features,

• Guest Management using Captive Portals - Guest users connecting to the Wi-Fi network can be redirected to a custom captive portal for authentication. When guests try to access the Internet through an Arista Access Point (AP) using the Guest SSID, the AP redirects the user to the captive portal to request authentication credentials. Upon successful login, the AP opens the gate for the user to access the Internet. GM supports several mechanisms to enable guest access.

• Presence Analytics - Presence analytics provide anonymous, statistical information about the footfall (number of Wi-Fi devices detected), dwell time (duration for which Wi-Fi devices are present) and repeat versus new customers. These trends can be viewed for a site or aggregated across multiple sites, and across different time periods: intra-day, daily, weekly, monthly and year-over-year.
• Engagement Analytics - Integration with social networks and third-party loyalty systems can be leveraged to collect demographics and other information from Wi-Fi users who opt in to share their personal details. This in turn can be used to engage with the opt-in Wi-Fi users, e.g., retail businesses can provide special deals to their loyal customers and convert them into brand ambassadors.
• Zone Analytics - Provides insight into the density and flow of Wi-Fi users by visualizing it on a floor map. This allows administrators to monitor how various parts of a facility are populated over a period of time. Zones can be demarcated as a region around Wi-Fi APs on a floor map.
• Content analytics and application visibility - Web analytics and application visibility based on deep packet inspection can provide insight into Wi-Fi usage patterns and allow you to enforce policies in terms of the type of content or applications that can or cannot be accessed based on the type of Wi-Fi network (e.g., Corp vs. Guest) and user privileges (e.g., students vs. teachers) and assign the desired quality of service.

Learn more about Guest Manager

REST API standards followed by Arista Services

All the Arista Wi-Fi service APIs follow the below standard,

• Session based - The API user needs to initiate a session with the service to make any API calls.
• Supports API Key based authentication - All services support API key based authentication. Each key can be assigned access privileges from the Launchpad user interface.
• Supports the HTTP verbs,
  • GET - to fetch a resource
  • PUT - to modify a resource
  • POST - to create a resource
  • DELETE - to delete the resource.
• Supports application/json as response format.

API Key Authentication (Cloud only)

A unique API Key needs to be generated and managed from the Launchpad user interface¹ and has the same sophisticated authorization mechanisms as those for users. All Arista Wi-Fi Services support API Key authentication.

^{1 Access Launchpad UI -> Admin -> Keys}

API Base URLs

The API base URLs are available on CV-CUE (version 12.0 and higher).
To see the base URLs, on the CV-CUE UI go to System > Advanced Settings > Base URLs for APIs.
As shown in the figure below, you can see the base URLs for the Configuration and Management APIs (i.e., APIs for the Wireless Manager service) and the Guest Analytics APIs (i.e., APIs for the Guest Manager service).

For more information and guidance contact support-wifi@arista.com