Monitoring and managing your wireless network

Just out of interest how are you managing and monitoring your wireless network?

I think my way might be a bit lame but we don't have much money. Basically I have setup a network monitor using an old PC, Linux and a system called Zenoss. AP's around the network are pinged on a regular basis, if one goes down it's flagged up and I get sent an email. It's setup similar to HP openview where there is a display of the devices on the network and if something fails it will change colour from green to red. I can also telnet and gain http access from it.

Have a look into Nagios... there is a HOWTO on the wiki.

I use SNMP to monitor the management controller but with suitable APs you could monitor them with SNMP so that you would now about bandwidth, connections and the like.

I use a tool called RFlow Collector with our DD-WRT firmware Linksys APs. It shows me the active APs and the clients connected to them along with signal strengths.

The APs are capable of syslog and SNMP, but I have those disabled for now.