topic GA Announcement: Cisco Wireless Active Testing On-Prem in Wireless

GA Announcement: Cisco Wireless Active Testing On-Prem

anijjer — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:09:51 GMT

Announcing General Availability: Proactively Assure Your Wireless Experience with Cisco Wireless Active Testing On-Prem

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Cisco Wireless Active Testing with ThousandEyes! This powerful new solution transforms how you assure your wireless network's performance by turning access points into proactive synthetic clients.

Move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive assurance and gain unparalleled visibility into the end-user experience—before your users even connect.

What is Wireless Active Testing?

Wireless Active Testing with ThousandEyes allows users to enable Cisco Wireless 9172H Access Points to act as synthetic clients, proactively identifying Wi-Fi issues in real time. By integrating the ThousandEyes Endpoint Agent, these wall plate APs perform end-to-end wireless onboarding and application performance tests directly at the network edge, delivering wireless assurance insights and driving towards an optimal user experience.

How Does It Work?

The architecture is designed for seamless integration. A designated wall-plate CW9172H access point, managed by your Cisco Catalyst 9800 Wireless LAN Controller (running 17.18.2+), hosts a ThousandEyes Endpoint Agent. This agent uses the AP's radio to connect to other nearby APs over your specified SSIDs, just like a real client device would.

Once connected, it runs a suite of ThousandEyes synthetic tests to measure every step of the journey:

Wi-Fi Connection: validates 802.11 association, 802.1X/EAP authentication, and DHCP.
Network & Application Performance: Runs tests for packet loss, jitter, latency, DNS resolution, and HTTP/HTTPS availability to critical internal and external applications (like Webex, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and more).

All test data is sent directly to the ThousandEyes dashboard, giving you a view of your wireless health.

Key Value to Your Organization

Active Testing is built on three foundational pillars to enhance your network operations:

Proactively Assure Readiness: Validate infrastructure performance and readiness with scheduled synthetic tests. You can catch issues early after configuration changes or overnight, ensuring the network is ready for business hours before the first user logs on.
Accelerate Issue Resolution: Reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) by pinpointing issues faster. With continuous network baselining and validation, you get actionable insights to understand the root cause, whether it's in the Wi-Fi onboarding process, the network path, or the application itself.
Gain End-to-End Visibility: Track application performance all the way from the access point to the cloud. Because the solution runs natively on Cisco Wi-Fi APs, there is no additional hardware required to gain this deep level of insight.

Use Cases

Validating Network Changes: Test the impact of WLAN configuration changes on user experience.
Assuring Critical Application Access: Continuously monitor the performance of business-critical SaaS and internal applications from the perspective of a wireless user.
Monitoring Remote & Branch Offices: Proactively test the Wi-Fi experience at remote locations without needing staff on-site.
Troubleshooting Complex Issues: Quickly determine if a problem is related to Wi-Fi authentication (EAP), DHCP, DNS, or the network path.

Ready to get started on your proactive assurance journey? Dive into Active Testing with ThousandEyes and start seeing your wireless network like never before.

Read the deployment guide for more information.

If you have any questions, we have our Wireless Product Manager, @kvankeul here to answer questions

Re: GA Announcement: Cisco Wireless Active Testing On-Prem

Mark Elsen — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:16:47 GMT

- @anijjer This link from your post : Read the deployment guide for more information
gives me : 403 - Forbidden Page or Application

Re: GA Announcement: Cisco Wireless Active Testing On-Prem

anijjer — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:38:26 GMT

Gah! Good spot. I edited the post to fix, but it's also here: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/controller/9800/technical-reference/active-testing-wireless-on-prem-dg.html

Re: GA Announcement: Cisco Wireless Active Testing On-Prem

Mark Elsen — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:40:37 GMT

- @anijjer Thank you ,

Re: GA Announcement: Cisco Wireless Active Testing On-Prem

balaji.bandi — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 07:57:37 GMT

Thank you for sharing the information. All of it is good, but how many of them are already using the 17.18.2 code on the WLC?

This document only shows 9172H. How about old AP 9120 or other models? Would you happen to know if this won't work?

When you configure the WLC, do you know whether it needs to reboot?

When you apply the configuration to the AP profile, does the AP need to reboot? (Will all the APs in the Group reboot ?)

There is already a DNA space collecting information from WLC. Is there any integration that can be done between WLC and DNA space (VM sitting to collect data) so it's seamless integration (just a thought)?

Re: GA Announcement: Cisco Wireless Active Testing On-Prem

talasgair — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:40:15 GMT

Can we manage the cw9172h from a different WLC to test a production network running 17.12? Eg could we used a 9800CL running 17.18.2 for this or does the test AP have to connect to the same WLC as the APs under test?

Re: GA Announcement: Cisco Wireless Active Testing On-Prem

nfitelop — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 13:06:05 GMT

Yes @talasgair you can do that!