Tutorial by NightShade1
Hello everyone!
Today i have decided to make a tutorial about the dashboard! which is really helpful and well not everyone use it when you should! it can give you good information by just looking it!
Okay let gets started ill go through the Dashboard explaining what is most of the things on it.
When you open the dashboard you will see this!
First you can see the clients which you can see a few interesting things
- will give you the total of clients connected to your WLAN which in this case is 53
- How many clients are connected to 5ghz band with 802.11a(not 802.11n) which in this case is 1
- How many clients are connected to 5ghz band with 802.11a(but those are 802.11n clients on 5ghz band) which is a HT(high Throughput) in thise case there are 2 clients
- How many clients are connected to 5ghz band but using channel of 4Mhz which is bounded channels(bounded channel is something that use 2 channels on the 5ghz band to make a bigger channel and that way they can transmit at higher speed in this case if its a AP 105 you will be able to connect to 300Mbs if your Wireless nic can handle it of course)
- You will see the same information on the 2.4ghz band which is g(you will see in this case 50 users on 802.11g) and non on 802.11n on the 2.4ghz band!
- One note of here is that you should NEVER see noone connected on HT 40MHz on 2.4ghz band it should always be 0 because you can bound channels on it but its not recommended! so it should be always on 0
Now lets look at the client SNR(signal noise radio)
As you can see in the picture below you can see the bars going from red to green which green is good and red is bad and orange is so so... you will always want to see your clients on green, you will never want to see your clients on red, if you see this, then there is too much noise for that client
Now let see the speed
You dont want to see many users on slow speed, it could mean that users can be too far from the APS and you might need more APS for better coverage, and if you dont have the airtime fairness on and you should always have it!, it can slow down your wireless performance! In this case this wireless lan deploy got like 90% of old AP 61 and thats why you see soo many clients on slow speeds of around 54mbs...
Now lets go to the AP side!
Noise floor!
You will never want to see your APS on the red color! actuallly neither on orange in this side...
everything lower than 80 its means that there is too much noise... as you can see in the graphic!
And if you click on it, it will give you more information as you will see in the next graphic
As you see -78 its bad and it means there is too much noise in this AP! this mean you need to investigate there, what is causing soo much noise(could be microwave, blutooth devices etc) non 802.11 interferece. You can always use ap in spectrum monitor to check that out!
Now lets take a look to the interference! which is 802.11 interference! you willl always want to see it in green, ifyou see it in red or orange there is too much 802.11 interference which could be neighbor APs making you interference or maybe your own antenas with too much output power on them in which they can hear themselve on the same channel specially on 2.4ghz band
Channel busy is in porcenge how much is the channel of the AP is using is being use!, if you see that there is too much channel use you can always click to get more info and see, maybe you need another ap in there!
Now to the left side you will see an option of Access point if you click it you will see this information
If you see here you can get good information! all in one tab!
You can see the channel utilization , the output power of the APs
How many clients are associated to an AP which is really really important!. Depending on what you using for example if you are on an AP 61 you dont want to see more than 15 users on that AP! and if you using voice over wifi you dont want to see more than 9 maybe... so its all good info!
Frames retried! you dont want to see more than 30% of frame retries otherwise it means too many 802.11 interference
So this is just an overview of what information you can get from the dashboard for the performance part of it!
I bealive this is the most important things you need to see for the performance part
Hope it helps you guys
Cheers
Carlos
[Mod note: edited subject line for readability]