Network Management

Hello All,

I am looking to use my airwave server more in the user wlan troubleshooting process.  Does anyone have any suggestions on what screens/tools inside airwave are really useful when you have a user calling you up to say they are having trouble connecting, or experiencing slow speeds, or having very high latency?

Also related to this, is there a good document anywhere on interpreting the data from the "Radio Statistics" page in airwave.  I see the MAC/PHY errors and the counters for failure rates, but how do I interpret the data to tell me there is or isn't a problem?

Thanks.

AMP is a great tool for troubleshooting wireless and client issues. There is documentation for this in the documentation section of your AMP server. Home > Documentation > Best Practices Guides > Help Desk Guide : Troubleshooting Wireless Issues. 

Also, there is a client diagnostic view you can enable for users so that when they log in to AMP they see a very simplified interface that streamlines the process for them. You can enable this by going into the roles and creating a Help Desk role. In the role enable "Display client diagnostics screens by default". Now create a Help Desk user and assign them the Help Desk role. Login with the user account and you will see a much different view then that of an AMP admin.  

Thanks for the suggestions.

I have read,, and re-read now the documentation and I do the things it is describing (checking to see if the user is associated and network authenticated and looking at the load of the AP).  

I do have a few questions about the subjective terms it uses in some parts and hopefully someone can answer.  In the document figure 4; what would be 'unusually high' usage.    On the last page it says to check error and retry rates to see if they are high (and I really want to), but what is high?  Is this a percent versus total frames or just the number of frames.  Getting that percent versus total frames would be useful.

My network environment is a university campus so we have access points with sometimes no load, and other times a very high association count but only a few active users, or a very high load.  Issue reporting is spotty, in areas where I know we need upgrades it is easy to identify RF coverage and capacity issues.  But for the upgraded buildings designed for high density of users, knowing how to interpret more of the data airwave is showing to me would be very useful in identifying problems and making appropriate changes.

The determining factor of what is high usage / error counts is dependent on your network.  What is high for a school deployment might be low in an office deployment or vice versa, which is why there are no set numbers in the document.  This is based on the trending you find in your network, perhaps based on daily reports that focus on peak user times.  You may also find some helpful tips from EDUCAUSE (http://www.educause.edu/) for AirWave in university deployments.

To your last point about seeing the upgraded buildings, you may find VisualRF's heatmap view to be helpful.

Is this document somewhere on the web?  I have the Dell branded Airwave and it doesn't contain that troubleshooting guide.

The doc is not currently on the support site.  I'm going to look into that.  Meanwhile, I've messaged you privately -> click the mail icon next to your username at the top right of the screen.