NerveCenter WACenter Application

Wireless Networks Become More and More Critical and Complex

The importance of wireless networks for business success grows every day.  Wireless networks used to be a luxury, but today it is a necessity to be able to connect wirelessly.  Also, connectivity is no longer solely on a computer.  Individual connectivity can be multiple computers, a smart phone and a tablet all at once.

Many organizations provide wireless access to ecommerce apps as part of their customer experience.

Wireless network down-time or degradation cause lost productivity, employee frustration and lost revenue from poor customer experience.  The monitoring of wireless networks offers unique challenges. in addition to infrastructure failures, network overload and high activity levels, high channel usage and excessive user counts on access points (APs) can cause failure or degradation.  There are also concerns about APs not joined to a wireless access controller, rogue APs and AP licensing compliance.

How does NerveCenter’s WACenter help?

Here are some WACenter monitoring use cases:

• In Use
  • Determine number of APs in use
  • Determine if AP is operational and correctly configured
• Disconnects
  • Check for large % of sudden AP or client drops (percentage based on current vs previous poll)
• Utilization
  • Determine latency on WLCs (alert on sustained threshold crossed)
  • Determine AP channel usage (if threshold crossed, poll faster)
  • Determine if AP high channel usage is sustained high (alert if sustained)
  • Determine if AP receive and transmit utilization are sustained at a high level
  • Check to see if AP user count is high causing performance degradation
• Licensing
  • Determine the total number of AP licenses on a WLC cluster
  • Aggregate the total number of AP licenses on WLC cluster (alarm if license usage exceeded)
  • Determine software version running on WLC (alert if not an approved version)

Highlights of how WACenter can help improve the up-time of your wireless network are:

• Can be implemented as a standalone App (does not require host monitoring solution)
• Can be an add-on to existing NerveCenter implementation
• Does more than the basic monitoring
• Uses correlation in monitoring and alerting
• Alerts when threshold exception is sustained
• Correlates APs joined to WLC
• Is configured to monitor all Wireless Network equipment providers
• Alerts can be seen on smart phones and tablets