Monitoring wireless networks

[Marshall_IT]

Hi all,

 

I'm about to place a much larger load on my wireless network (ruckus) and I'm wondering what people use to monitor their wifi, collisions overload and back haul.

 

Thanks in advance.

[psydii]

Meru's system director gives a good general health dashboard.

 

Retransmissions are the killer. 1x1:1 wireless devices are the weapon

You can use wireshark on a Mac Pro to watch the air.

 

http://ask.wireshark.org/questions/6386/wlan-link-layer-retransmissions

 

Backhaul is your switch, so keep an eye on peak loads and perhaps use a network monitoring tool to draw you graphs.

 

Another thing that can be a limiting factor is CPU load on the AP (for older APs), some vendors let you telnet is and keep an eye on that too.

Edited February 24, 2014 by psydii

[seawolf]

Hi all,

 

I'm about to place a much larger load on my wireless network (ruckus) and I'm wondering what people use to monitor their wifi, collisions overload and back haul.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

The Ruckus ZD has quite a few good tools for monitoring your WiFi network, including the real time monitoring, maps, etc. There is also the very nice ZD Remote iPad app that shows things such as:

 

- Total Client Devices

- Rogue Devices

- Number of clients on each WLAN (SSID)

- Active devices

- Device types (by OS)

- Most active devices

- Usage (bandwidth, average signal dB, etc.)

- Most used APs (and clients

 

We also use PRTG to provide graphing of our network, including the Ruckus APs.