UXI Agent for Windows and macOS

The UXI agent for Windows and macOS devices is a software application that runs on end-user devices, offering visibility into how users perceive the network—specifically, their digital experience.

Useful information provided by the agent

Wi-Fi Experience: Collects detailed Wi-Fi metrics such as signal (RSSI), transmission (Tx) rate, BSSID, band, and channel. It also presents a Wi-Fi visualization chart with information like channel overlap, SSIDs, channel width, and signal strength of nearby APs. This helps admins visualize signal strength and interference from the end-user's perspective.
App Experience: Can be used to test mission-critical apps, both internal and external to your environment. The agent provides valuable information such as DNS lookup time, HTTP GET elapsed time, packet loss, latency, jitter, and gateway reachability.
Device Information: Analyzes the host device and captures details such as model, OS, adapter information, along with resource utilization on the user device, including CPU, memory, and battery utilization.
Back-in-Time Troubleshooting: Provides back-in-time triage, enabling network admins to validate network changes and view historical values for root-cause analysis.
Data Push Destinations: Enables IT teams to export data and correlate the client view with other sources of data to identify discrepancies and support further decision-making.
User Self-Service Portal: Highlights network and application status, indicating red (facing issue) or green (everything is working well). It also captures commonly requested device and network information by IT teams, such as OS, ISP, PHY mode, and MSC index.

Please note that the product is still in beta, so there are some current gaps that we are planning to address before either Select or General Availability.

Known Limitations

PCAP is not included under issue triage.
Roaming capabilities have limited support.
Improvements are needed for installing the agent on Windows devices.
MDM installation support is currently not available for Windows and macOS.

Future Consideration

Currently, the agent only tests networks added to the UXI dashboard for monitoring. The agent does not test any network outside the defined list. In the future, we plan to introduce features that will allow network admins to opt to test specific applications or all applications on all networks the user connects to.

Installation, Configuration & Subscription

Windows:

You will see the file HPE_Aruba_Networking_UXI_Agent.msi. Click on it to download. You will see a prompt on your device; please click "Keep." (Note: We are still working on a signed version of the agent to remove this popup.)

Go to the location where the file is downloaded.
Right-click the file and select "Run as administrator." The following window will open; click "Next" and then "Install."

You might see warning messages like the ones below; please ignore them for now.
Once the agent is installed, if you didn’t choose to run it from the installation wizard, you can run it by right-clicking in the Start menu and selecting “Run as Administrator.” Please note, a command prompt window will open while the agent is running; please ignore it for now. The agent will be available as an icon in the system tray (right side of your taskbar). Make sure that you always run the agent in admin mode.

Proceed to Provisioning Section.

macOS:

You will see the file HPE_Aruba_Networking_UXI_Agent.pkg. Click on it to download.
Go to the location where the file is downloaded.
Double-click the file. A window will open as shown below.

Click "Continue" and then "Install." You will either need to provide the password or use your fingerprint, depending on your system.

Once installed, you will see a prompt to provide the password one more time. Please enter the password and click "Install Helper."

Provisioning

After you have successfully run the agent application, you will see a small smiley in the menu bar. Click on it. A small popup will appear as shown below.

Go to the UXI dashboard and perform the following steps:
- Settings > Select "Sensors and Agents" under Locations > Click "Add."
- A popup will appear. In the popup, select "Agent" > Proceed
- Select a group if you would like > Click "Copy token to clipboard."
- On your device, paste this in the test box and click "Save."
The agent will start testing immediately if it is connected to one of the networks defined under "Wireless Network" on the UXI dashboard.

Expected platform support for internal testing: Windows 10 & above, MacOS 12-14.

Subscription

A subscription is required from UXI for the dashboard to work. Subscriptions are enforced on the dashboard, not on the agent. We will add agents to the dashboard using the names you have provided. Alternatively, you can request this via email at auxi@hpe.com.

Note: UXI is a vendor-neutral platform and works with any infrastructure provider.

Agent in Action

Once the agent is started, it will appear on your UXI dashboard and begin reporting test results within 5 to 10 minutes.

The UXI agent runs in the background on the device and performs low-impact synthetic tests to measure the end-user experience from the user's perspective.

Synthetic Tests

The test cycle runs every 2-5 minutes and performs the following tests:

AP Scan
Gateway reachability
DNS check (a check to see if the agent can resolve cdn.capenetworks.io)
HTTP GET
PING

The agent can only test the network it is connected to. You cannot change the network settings as you would for a hardware sensor.

You can assign the agents to groups and then assign tests to groups and networks.

If the agent doesn't support an assigned test, it will skip it.

Open Bugs

This is a high-level list of open bugs for the agent. If you experience any bugs or have feature requests, please raise them.

DNS lookup time is not reported for IPv6 addresses.
Certain agent UI issues, such as the alignment of the agent UI on Windows, etc.
Wi-Fi environment chart does not load on macOS 14.5.