Network Management

Hello

We are trying to draw stats out of Airwave for room utilization purposes by collecting data on Wi-Fi usage in particular locations on particular times and dates.

None of the inbuilt reports seems to fit the function we need. A bit of background is that we have access points in different University institutions spread all over the city, we have organised these in Airwave into folder hierarchies based upon buildings and in some cases further subdivided the folders where we are interested in particular areas.

We want to be able to pull out data on the activity on particular access points or rooms/ lecture theatres etc. at specific times and dates for room utilization purposes. The only way we have found to do this so far is to put a number of APs in a specific/special folder to be able monitor a specific group of APs on the device/list/ folder on Airwave. We use the date/time search box to narrow down the window we require and then simply copy and paste the client and usage graphs/charts that we need. Alternatively, we do the above but instead on individual access point basis rather than a group of them in a folder.

Obviously, this is quite protracted, because we have to, firstly, place the APs in specific folders to get collective statistics on just those APs and then also go to the truble of manually copying and pasting out the data.

Is there a method for automating this process, or actually getting at the raw data under these graphs/charts and exporting it?

Thanks

Alexander.

I would run the RF health Report for the folder that you want and sort by number of clients.

Thanks, that's a good tip. However we want to be able to see the stats for example a specific lecture theatre on a day basis or a perhaps week basis, rather than the total number of clients during a defined period. This is where the charts are useful.

For example looking at a specific day:

At 10am the LT had 500 clients

at 12pm it had 40

at 2pm it had 250

at 4pm it had 200

We can then conclude see the room is underutilized between 12 and 2. I'm not sure RF health would do that

We also have 100s of folders.

Alexander.

If you put each lecture hall's access points into a folder, the traditional front page view, when you drill down to that folder will show you the client trend for that folder.

Here is an example.  You can use the custom picker to stretch it out as far as you want:

Thanks, that's the method we are using now (that I clumsily tried to describe). But we've got 100s of areas we want to potentially monitor over different time frames, so we're hoping to be able to do something more automatic or extract the raw data somehow.

Thanks

Alexander.

If you have hundreds of locations, you would need to put the locations you are really interested in into folders so that they can be categorized.  It takes a few seconds to make a folder based on a location and then add devices to it.  You do not lose visibilty of the folders above.  If you have to analyze the data in another way, you would still have to somehow indicate the devices that you want categorized, somehow.  Heirarchical reporting or quick views of trends is the main goal of the foldering system and that is what it is designed for.

Thanks Colin,

Thanks for your reply. We may be talking at cross purposes.

We have put the areas of interest in separate folders and then can see the detail of those charts. But because we have multiple areas of interest we are hoping to finds a less manual method to obtain the data. Doing it this way way means going to each individual chart for each site and then having to look at a range of dates and times for every time of interest. Plotting trends this way is very manual. We ideally want to be able to suck out / export the data to be able to anaylse elsewhere.

Many thanks

Alexander.

 

Understood.  That would be convenient if there was just a shortcut to that information.  I don't think Airwave has that flexibility at this time.  

Thanks as always for your help Colin. I might put in a feature request for this through our Aruba TM.

Alexander