Monitoring wireless LAN controllers
Site24x7 provides comprehensive monitoring for wireless LAN controllers (WLCs) and their associated access points, giving you real-time visibility into your wireless network's health, performance, and client activity. With WLC monitoring, you can track service set identifier (SSID) usage, monitor connected clients, and analyze bandwidth consumption to ensure optimal performance and fast troubleshooting for wireless environments.
Purposes
- Monitor WLCs and their associated access points to ensure optimal wireless network performance.
- Track the number of clients connected to each SSID and analyze their bandwidth usage.
- Gain insights into client-specific details like the IP address, MAC address, SSID, signal strength, and connection duration.
- Detect discrepancies in the client count or traffic spikes to facilitate faster troubleshooting and capacity planning.
Prerequisites
- Install the On-Premise Poller, version 6.4.4 or above, with network reachability to the WLC.
- Enable and configure SNMP access on the WLC.
- Add the correct SNMP credentials in Site24x7:
- SNMPv1/v2: The community string
- SNMPv3: The username, authentication and privacy protocols, and keys
Definition of terms used
Access points
Access points are hardware devices that connect Wi-Fi enabled devices to a wired network.
SSID
An SSID is a list of all the wireless networks broadcasted by your access points.
Clients connected
Clients Connected refers to the number of network devices that are linked to the access points in your organization's SSIDs.
Supported WLC vendors
Site24x7 supports WLC monitoring for devices from the following vendors:
- Aruba
- Autelan
- Cisco
- H3C
- Hongxin
- Huawei
- RUCKUS
- Ruijie
How it works
| Phase | Description |
|---|---|
| Discovery | Site24x7 automatically detects all access points and wireless clients under a WLC monitor using SNMP queries. |
| Monitoring | Periodic polling of the WLC is done to fetch key metrics such as the access point status, client count, signal strength, and bandwidth usage. |
| Visualization | The collected data is grouped by SSIDs and access points for easier analysis. Graphs, filters by the time range, and alert logs enable deeper insights into performance trends and events. |
Adding a WLC monitor
Make sure that SNMP is enabled and the appropriate credentials are configured for the WLC. Additionally, ensure that the WLC is correctly connected to its access points. Then, proceed to add the WLC as a monitor in Site24x7.
View WLC details
If you have added a WLC as a monitor in Site24x7, you can view details about the device and its associated SSIDs and access points by following these steps:
- Log in to your Site24x7 account.
- Navigate to Network > Network Devices.
- Click the WLC monitor that you've added.
- Navigate to the WLC tab to view details of the WLC, like the Access Points and SSID.
Access Points
View and manage individual access points discovered through WLCs.
Device Templates
View and select monitoring templates based on the system object identifiers for WLCs and access points.
Credentials
Manage SNMP credentials used for device discovery and monitoring.
Troubleshooting
To troubleshoot data collection issues, query the object identifiers corresponding to your issue.