Network Management

We moved into a new building and we're getting spurious but consistent reports of WiFi connection drops. What tools would allow me to troubleshoot the reasons people are dropping given that we don't have the Aruba APs for clarity sythetic transaction etc? Thx.

The RF Health report is probably a good starting point.

Beyond that, you may need to rely on some of the more manual debug process to validate if it's potential issues when a user roams between the 2 wlans.

Another thing you can do, if it's the same user reporting - you can add the clients to the 'watched' list.  View client details -> there's a toggle to watch client, they will appear on the main Client dashboard page for easier access.

You can also create a trigger for whenever that client logs in so that you can go into active debug monitoring to trace their user experience from the controllers.

Aside from that, you can leverage support for assistance if needed.

When you refer to Debug can that be initiated via Airwave? Or you're saying to do to that on the Cisco WLC or AP? 

And on a related issue - when I am seeing drops I am seeing increases in noise and worsened SNR. How can I identify the cause of the spikes in noise? 

Manual debugging would be enabling of additional debug logging locally from the controllers.  Increasing log level and such to capture more information - AirWave doesn't capture the log activity, but can be used to run some of the basic cmds from controller monitoring page -> run cmd drop down options.  You might also try to do a packet dump during the timeframe when users report the disconnect the most - again this is local on the controllers to perform.

AirWave can provide the trending data, and possibly alert on specific clients that are reporting the issue more frequently.  But it won't have the deep dive info needed to point out the exact cause, that's data that'd be needed from the controller logs.  You would be able to see the change in noise and SNR in the radio details - are you seeing a lot of channel changes / transmit power adjustments at the same time?

It's much easier to do a shared screen session than trying to talk through in a forum as there's several troubleshooting steps to go through - I suggest getting a TAC case to get such a session going.

Example path for the Aruba side:

1) On Aruba controllers, enable all debug log topics

2) Try to find out which clients see the behavior the most and time frame of the occurence.

3) See if you can connect a static client during the time frame to reproduce the disconnect.  If you can reliably reproduce the drop, then it makes troubleshooting much easier.

4) Perform a packet dump from the controllers that captures when a client sees a drop

5) Provide the logging and packet dump to support to analyze

I don't currently have Cisco gear to compare the Cisco experience, but I imagine the debug steps would still be very similar.