This blogpost focuses on using ExtremeCloudIQ from Extreme Networks. The portal is quite a user friendly and has some built-in capabilities which can help troubleshoot day to day problems with Wireless. Let’s take a look.
Client Statistics
The good thing about Extreme Cloud IQ is you can see Real-Time & Historical client information of their connections. This does help to find out which AP was/is the client associated with, the SNR and check other stats like roaming, DHCP, DNS. You can navigate to this by clicking on Manage > Clients
You can drill down by searching for the client using IP Address / Mac Address / Device Host Name
After clicking on the client you can see the current connection status on the right hand side with regards to VLAN/SSID/Radio/Channel. On the Top you can check the current AP associated. The page has lot of details about the client and more information can be drilled by changing the Time Range to Day/Week/Month depending on how far you want to analyse.
You can further scroll down to check the roaming patterns/time for the client and also check what apps it is using. I’ve found the Session Details section quite useful to check WiFi Health, Application Health and Client Radio Info etc.
From this screen one can navigate to CLIENT TOOLS which has an option for “Troubleshoot Now” which runs the client monitor and captures the events as they happen.
Device Checks
You can perform device level checks by Navigating to Manage > Devices – page. The list can be filtered based on the Locations/Device Types/Connection state/SSID etc..
You can run command line from this screen targeting to one/multiple devices to show relevant information like below.
Action > Advanced > CLI Access
Tools
There are lot of tools available on the portal which can help with the Wi-Fi analysis. This section can be navigated via Manage > Tools section
The Client Monitor is a good place to start looking at the network-wide issues for any Association/Authentication or Networking (DHCP/DNS) issues.
Packet Capture – Can easily perform AP radio interface level capture for analysis or requested by TAC for troubleshooting.
The Utilities tab opens up a whole lot of useful features. I’ve found a few ones to be really helpful.
- Locked Devices – Can be used to unlock devices that are locked due to failed authentication when using PPSK.
- Get Tech Data – instantaneously captures the Tech Data from AP, similar to the “show tech support” command. Useful to avoid sometimes having to scroll annoyingly for mins to capture the information.
- VLAN Probe – Useful to check the number of available IP addresses on a VLAN.
- Device Diagnostics – The section can open a range of commands which can be executed per/AP level to extract relevant information.
The Diagnosis tab show the captures executed on the devices and display their log information.
One of the key things to note from Aerohive/Extreme documentation that they provide good contextual info when navigating in a particular section or screen.
Examples like below
https://docs.aerohive.com/330000/docs/help/english/ng/Content/gui/troubleshoot/using-client-monitor.htm
https://docs.aerohive.com/330000/docs/help/english/ng/Content/gui/devices/viewing-the-device-list.htm
