Active polling of AP status/changes

Wicky

Regularly it is observed that the current status on a page is not correctly displaying actual values when changes to radio settings are forced. A kind of provisioning button or active refresh of the AP actual setting would be ideal.
Currently only a message is displayed reporting the delay

Zyxel_Dean

Hi @Wicky
Could you describe more about this idea? 
Are you looking for a provisioning button to refresh status of a radio settings page?

Wicky

Hi Dean,

Indeed. Certain in page updates reflecting changes are not up to date and now it is hard to find out when the actual changes are effective. So either a provisioning button or more frequent polling of the status shown.

Wicky

I get the impression that on other places quite some delay is observed is when looking at stats. And example is when looking for clients attached to what AP. Although roaming has already been taken place the status is not reflected quick. I have no idea how frequent status of AP is send to the cloud control or polled but some more fine tuning would be welcome. Could you tell how status is collected (polling by Cloud control or pushed by AP)

Zyxel_Dean

Hi @Wicky
The polling of data has an interval of 3 minutes of the statistical information sent from AP to the servers. Each time you access or refresh the webpage on NCC, it querys again the information from server database. 

Wicky

Hi Dean,

Would that be an idea to have this info pulled from the AP’s immediately ? Or to be able to set a much high refresh rate during an active monitoring period ?
The data is lingering behind when trying to use current stats to diagnose. That was one of the reasonings also behind the active polling/changes idea. 
So something like a monitoring function /button forcing the AP to send in a high frequency stats to the database which are then retrieved by the wegpage.

Zyxel_Dean

Hi @Wicky

We have your idea of refreshing page stats by a button in the roadmap already. You do make a point on the refresh rate. For some people they do feel a bit slow when it comes to troubleshooting, we are aware of this but it's kind of a tradeoff between stability and performance on the server and device in general. 
I think what could be proposed is making something in the live tools that we already have this framework for real-time stats. Maybe you can give us an idea of what you would like to have as a live tool for monitoring/troubleshooting.


Dean

Wicky

Hi Dean,

I perfectly understand that enabling live monitoring is not ideal to have continuously running. But if you have already a live stats framework (TX rate, RX rate, etc...) that would be ideal if that could be enabled/disabled when needed. 
Simple things as what client is currently connected at what point, TX, RX value, ... Std things which are already there but should be 'live' during montoring. 
Things like SNR values/RSSI values, other WIFI networks seen by the AP's, roaming time of a client between AP's are useful. As mentioned somewhere else I have seen a competitor doing a kind of offline scanning of non-wifi interference through their AP (Ubiquiti). This simple RF scan which I did lead me actually to finding a strong inteference of channel 1 (2.4Ghz) coming from my alarm system (radar).

Maybe an even wilder idea. As you already have the possibility to upload a floormap you could do a wifi survery. You have the RSSI values of the devices (AP point of view) and together with the iOS or Android app you could produce a heat map from an actual device. So either by manual interaction the user taps the floorplan where he is located or you use the devices GPS function to determine the relative position within the maps. I think you could even get the RSSI values from the devices point of view (probably not for iOS and only for Android)
So if you have live monitoring of these values you could built something like this. 

Knowing what the RSSI values are within the actual deployement with actual devices will help defining the treshold RSSI values for the clients to be kicked.

Does this make sense ?

Regards,

Dirk

Zyxel_Dean

Hi Dirk,

I would guess your idea is mainly to have a realtime monitor for client RSSI values in live tools for quicker notice of client signal strength as your needs are " faster deployment+troubleshoot". 

The heatmap on the other hand , we have this kind of request before, but as to fulfill your needs I think the live tool idea may be a better option, developement wise should be more possible to acomplish and faster to implement.

If you're fine with this idea, then I think we're clear of the concept and put this as an item on the wish list.

Dean

Wicky

Hi Dean,

Well for me that would already be a good point to have the live values of the RSSI. But also hand-over time if roaming happens would be something that is valuable.

Regarding the heat map. I'm fully aware that it would require much more effort but I believe if you could make this work with you mobile app. That would be a definitive killer feature. I haven't seen this before.

Requests list :

1) Live RSSI values and maybe hand-over/roaming time
2) Heatmap tool
3) AP based non-wifi interference scanning

As said for the near future the 1) is more realistic as you have already a framework. The 2) would be awesome if it gets sometime implemented. 3) would also add value to your solution I believe.

All these I think help for smaller deployments.