According to Juniper Mist documentation, the Throughput Service Level Expectation (SLE) is the primary metric used to measure the ability of wired clients to pass traffic across the physical network without impedance. This SLE is critical for diagnosing issues with real-time, high-bandwidth applications such as video streams, which are highly sensitive to packet loss and latency. Within the Throughput SLE, the Storm Control classifier is specifically designed to identify "bad user minutes" caused by the suppression of Broadcast, Unknown Unicast, and Multicast (BUM) traffic.
Storm control is a mechanism that enables the switch to monitor traffic levels and drop BUM packets when a specified traffic level-known as the storm control level-is exceeded. This prevents a "traffic storm" from proliferating and degrading the overall performance of the LAN. While this is a vital security feature to prevent network meltdowns, it can inadvertently impact legitimate traffic. For instance, if multicast-based video streams or other heavy BUM traffic exceed the configured bandwidth percentage on a port, the switch will drop those packets to protect the rest of the network.
When troubleshooting video stream issues, network administrators should inspect the Storm Control classifier to see if it is triggering "bad user minutes". If the Mist dashboard indicates failures under this classifier, it signifies that the switch hardware is actively dropping packets because the BUM traffic limit has been reached. This provides immediate root-cause evidence, allowing the administrator to determine if they need to adjust the storm control thresholds within the Port Profile or investigate the source of the excessive broadcast traffic. By correlating these hardware-level events with the end-user experience, Mist AI simplifies the resolution of complex performance problems that traditional "up/down" monitoring would miss.