The Cisco 8500 Series Wireless Controllers support Cisco Application Visibility and Control (AVC). Cisco AVC includes the Network-Based Application Recognition 2 (NBAR-2) engine Cisco's deep packet inspection (DPI) capability which classifies applications applies quality of service (QoS) settings to either drop or mark the traffic and prioritizes business-critical applications in the network. Cisco AVC uses NetFlow Version 9 to export the flows to Cisco Prime™ Infrastructure or a third-party NetFlow collector.

The Cisco 8500 Series also supports Bonjour Services Directory to enable Bonjour Services to be advertised and utilized in a separate Layer 3 network. A wireless policy engine on the Cisco 8500 Series enables profiling of wireless devices and enforcement of policies such as VLAN assignment QoS access control lists (ACLs) and time-of-day- based access.