Increased efficiency, availability, and cost-savings are among the many advantages that have made wireless networks an integral part of modern-day IT infrastructures. The growing dependency on wireless technologies, like Wi-Fi, has made wireless monitoring an essential task for IT admins. However, the sheer size and technical complexity of wireless networking can pose a challenge when monitoring wireless performance. Ensuring a seamless wireless networking experience requires the right set of wireless monitors to track crucial performance metrics, such as network uptime, and signal strength. With the myriad of wireless monitoring solutions available, you must choose the right wireless monitor that suits your network requirements.
ManageEngine OpManager provides a reliable wireless monitoring solution that monitors and tracks several wireless metrics and guarantees constant uptime and resource availability. This wireless monitoring software enhances wireless monitoring with its automation, proactive monitoring, real-time tracking, advanced reporting, and instantaneous alerting capabilities.
Issues such as higher network noise, access point coverage area constraints, interfering radio signals, and packet loss make wireless networking more challenging to work with than wired networks. But with OpManager's wireless monitor's easy-to-understand performance monitoring metrics, network admins can effectively detect, diagnose, and troubleshoot network issues. By displaying measurable wireless monitoring outputs to help diagnose the short-term and long-term performance of wireless networks, OpManager's wireless monitoring solution tracks crucial wireless performance metrics such as:
OpManager's wireless monitoring capability continually monitors network uptime, logs your network availability over a while, and helps you determine the stability and usability of your wireless networks. This wireless monitoring system displays various aspects of wireless network availability, including the periods of downtime and unavailability of a dependent network resource. The availability statistics and scheduled reports help network admins effectively analyze their wireless network's performance and health.
The performance and capacity of your wireless networks depend on their signal strength. Factors such as the coverage area of the access point, the number of clients (network users), and network noise can impact the signal strength. A weak network can result in a slow connection and sometimes even in the termination of connectivity.
OpManager's WiFi monitor enables you to effectively monitor the signal strength of your wireless networks. Usually, the signal strength within your network coverage area is above the minimum required value. However, your user can be closer to the wireless access point and still experience weak signals or issues with connecting to your network. This can be due to:
To tackle such issues, OpManager's WiFi analyzer capability offers a set of proactive wireless monitors including monitors for tracking client count, signal-to-noise ratio, and transmitted bytes in the managed access points. By setting up various monitors to track network metrics and minimizing the deterioration of signal strength, network admins can guarantee strong signals for stable connectivity.
Users complaining about slow download speeds, poor signal, and loss of network connectivity are common issues faced in wireless networking. The usual suspect in these scenarios is packet loss. Poor network performance, network congestion, and low bandwidth can trigger network packet loss which results in network packets from the source being dropped before reaching the destination. This can affect the overall health of your network as it negatively impacts the connection between your network access points and users.
OpManager's wireless monitor software displays the packet loss by pinging the managed wireless components, such as access points and wireless LAN controllers (WLCs), using the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP). This involves sending one ping per second between hosts and counting how many times the request is lost. With accurate measurements of packet loss, presented in both real-time and historical metrics, OpManager's wireless monitoring tools help end-users ensure their networks are performing up to expectations.
Response time is the time taken for the transfer of data from one point to another in a network. A higher response time (usually more than 100 ms) can indicate a lag in the network service or a higher latency. This can cause poor network performance. When it comes to wireless networks, data transfers can face transmission and processing hurdles such as other wireless interferences and switching access points which, in turn, increases the response time.
OpManager's wireless monitor helps you remediate these issues and enables you to improve the responsiveness of your networks. This wireless monitor tracks and displays the response time of wireless components, such as WLCs, in real-time. The response time metrics, along with OpManager's built-in trace route tool, can help you diagnose transmission and processing delays in sending packets from source to destination in your network.
Commonly caused by factors such as network congestion, collisions, and route changes, network jitter is an indicator of intermittent delays in the network's data transfer.
With the shift towards wireless networking, several concepts, including Voice over IP protocols (VoIP), have evolved to support both wired and wireless networking infrastructures. However, when compared to the wired networks, issues such as radio frequency interference and increased jitter can easily deteriorate your network performance.
Using OpManager, you can monitor jitter from source to destination, or destination to source, in real-time and set up thresholds for acceptable levels of network jitter. This wireless monitor can trigger instantaneous threshold-based alerts that can help network admins to effectively diagnose causes and troubleshoot network issues causing jitter.
Key to enabling stable wireless network performance and uptime is ensuring continuous monitoring of wireless resources. Resource outages or resource under utilization can trigger network issues that can impact network performance.
OpManager Wi-Fi analyzer offers various monitors that can keep tabs on resource utilization, such as monitors to track CPU utilization, memory utilization, system uptime, a client's total bytes transmissions, and more. Users can set up required monitoring intervals for OpManager to automatically track and update statuses. The results of these wireless monitors can be exported as reports, and scheduled to be distributed by email. OpManager triggers instantaneous alerts to escalate emerging resource utilization issues based on the thresholds set for resource utilization metrics.
During network discovery, OpManager automatically discovers wireless components, and groups the discovered components as devices, interfaces, WLCs, and access points so they can be monitored from a single pane of glass. This wireless monitoring solution provides a centralized console that helps you:
