Network Management

I would like to know how to create reports in airwave for certain laptops, to monitor their health, signal strength and usage, based on their mac – address. Is it possible to have displayed in a chart or graph.

Thanks

How many laptops are you trying to track?  The closest report is the Client Session report, but I don't believe it will do exactly what you're looking for.  If you can flesh out more details about what you're looking for, it would make a good feature requests.

 

In the meantime, if it's less than a dozen laptops, then you should make use of the watched clients list.  You first need to visit each laptop's client detail page, then update it to be a watched client.  After that, the watched clients will appear in a list when you visit Clients -> Overview (Keep in mind that watching all clients is not the appropriate use of this feature.  This feature is used to track clients of interest - perhaps VIPs or power users or clients who report the most issues to help with proactive wireless troubleshooting).  You can compound the watched list with the connected clients alert trigger, that way you can get an alert when a user is online to see how their wireless connection is compared to previous connections.

 

1) search for client username or mac

2) go to client detail page

3) update to watched client = yes

4) save

The client detail page will have the history of health, signal, usage - along with graphs.

Hi Rob, Thank you for your reply. I have tried to add clients to the watch client list. But our management wants more information: reporting and alerting. Let me give you some more information: I work a hospital and we have deployed about 50 – 60 mobile med carts, that have Lenovo Think Centre M93p Tiny Desktop inside. They are used by our nurses and are connected wirelessly to Aruba AP 135. Management wants a report on their connectivity, usage on historical basis, also for us to be alerted if they are experiencing connectivity issues. I have tried to create a custom report definition but the information wasn’t very useful and limited. Our airwave version is 7.7.3 and the OS on our controller is 6.3 Is it possible to add these devices and add them to group by floor and building and setup some reporting and alerting? Regards Jag

That explanation is very helpful.  While AirWave does have the client data that you're looking for, there's not an easy way to get to it the manner you're describing (from a list of clients).

 

This is a great feature request to make in the ideas portal.  I can see how it would really add to the client troubleshooting experience from AirWave.  Another avenue to take is to contact your sales rep to see if they can also make contact with Product Management to add traction to the request.

 

I'll also forward this on to the Product team as well to see if they have any ideas.

Hi Rob, I will make the request in the ideas portal as you suggested. In the clients watched list, what is the maximum number of clients that can be added in this list?. Regards Jag

There is no maximum.  The feature was just designed to highlight a short number of clients, but you could potentially add all 50-60 clients to the list and then just have to deal with the scrolling of a larger list.  This would then act as a launching page to get to the client data quicker than having to run searches all the time.

Jag,

 

You can achieve better results monitoring your infrastructure, than individual clients.  Wireless clients are transient, and are designed to work around or recover from a number of issues.  Not all of those issues manifest themselves in a counter or a log message that you can track.  They also connect and disconnect in a number of legitimate ways that you would somehow have to carve out from monitoring.  This makes it difficult or even impossible to proactively see a client in trouble and get data that is actionable.

 

The better approach is to configure your infrastructure so that your clients have enough headroom to act properly.  Anything that does not function properly in that environment can then be narrowed down to a location-specific or client-specific issue.  You would then monitor your infrastructure by adding triggers in airwave for certain events (access points up and down, number of clients over a certain threshold on an access for X number of minutes, or channel utilization reaches a certain threshold).  That would achieve better results in general.

 

If you can get more specific about your deployment and any issues that you have been having, the community can come up with some suggestions on what to look out for.

Hi Colin, Thank you for your feedback. We currently have setup alerts if an AP goes down for more that 10 mins.. Can you give me the steps to setup the other alerts and if we can specify them by floor or bldg. Thanks Jag

jag,

 

Under System> Triggers, you can setup a trigger "Channel Utilization" that will fire when interference reaches a certain threshold for a certain amount of time.  If you have your buildings separated into folders, you can assign the trigger to a specific folder so that it only triggers on that building...  You might want to start by looking at an area with problems, finding an AP's radio in that area and see what the historical interference is.

 

TIP: If you do not have any problems in that area, do not use the interference% from that area, because the trigger will be too low.