Troubleshooting an Arista Wireless Network
Wi-Fi trouble ticket complaints have been the same since the beginning of Wi-Fi. It's not working. It's dropping, the Wi-Fi is down and the end user only knows how to explain things so far. They give you inaccurate data because they don't know what you need to know.
The person receiving the complaint needs to know what questions to ask to determine who, what, where, and when and find out why.
If the end user is complaining that the wireless network is slow, the main dashboard overview gives a snapshot of connectivity.
Performance application experience, the wireless infrastructure and the wireless intrusion prevention system, the WIPs devices all on one page. Scroll down the page to see the overview of issue. Summary, the number of clients. The baseline of clients affected by failures and the percentage of poor experience and clients affected by the poor experience.
All these timelines are interactive and can be adjusted to focus on a single SSID, a particular frequency band, and a particular length of time, whether it be a month, a day, a week, or a few hours. Further down the page is the AAA latency, the DHCP latency and DNS latency statistics, which could show why an end user would experience that the wireless network is slow when it's not actually the wireless.
It could be the DHCP server or the DNS latency. And again, all these timelines have interactive hover bull uh, charts that show the historical. Metrics for AAA latency, DHCP latency and DNS latency. If they say that the Wi-Fi isn't working, ask them to elaborate on what they mean by not working. You'll need their IP address or MAC address and more information on what was happening when the Wi-Fi stopped working.
If they say the wifi isn't working, ask them to elaborate on what they mean by not working. You'll need their IP address or their MAC address, and more information on what was happening when the wireless stopped, quote unquote working. The data shown for a given client will show overview connectivity, performance applications, and a floor map.
The timeline shown will default to one day, but it can be set up to show the past month root cause analysis is performed when a client is selected for analysis. In this example, you can see that the client is being called out as having a very high retry rate and a low data rate because of the following reasons: High Contention. The channel used by the client experienced high contention from another access. Point in clients, you can see the issue summary over time as well as the application experience over time. Troubleshooting steps are available from the troubleshooting dropdown capture packet. Trace the packet, trace history. Start live client debugging. Disconnect the client and update the device tag or client connectivity test can be run.
If they say that the wifi isn't working, ask them to elaborate on what they mean by not working. You'll need their IP address or their MAC address and more information on what was happening when the wifi stopped working. The connectivity tab brings up the roaming Explorer. By default, client events view can also be chosen to display association or authentication requests. In this example, you can see the network authentication and association events.
You can see when issues took place if the connection was successful as well as the association responses, all the communication between the access point and the network for authentication and association.
If someone says that the Wi-Fi is dropping, this speaks to people being in video conference calls and experiencing the video conference stream freezing up, or the video dropping out. The audio may also be getting jittery, but what do they mean when they say the Wi-Fi is dropping? Can you elaborate on what you were doing when the Wi-Fi began dropping? Same questions about their IP address or their MAC address. Use the applications dashboard to drill down into the latency or poor application experience.
Statistics that are available for the overall company or a singular location. Use the AI option to look for the root causes for the affected clients. Root cause analysis will be run, and then a table will be displayed indicating what the root cause is for issues where the root cause could be determined.
In this example, the system was able to find root causes for 35 out of the 65 clients that were having issues, the root causes were determined to be low RSSI for certain clients. Poor coverage for two of the clients and multi-band client operating in 2.4 gigahertz for a one client were determined to be the root cause is a poor application experience.
In this example, the system was able to find root causes for 35 out of the 65 clients that were having issues, the root causes were determined to be low RSSI for certain clients. Poor coverage for two of the clients and multi-band client operating in 2.4 gigahertz for a one client were determined to be the root cause is a poor application experience.
When the root cause is identified and a reason is determined, there is an option to click the How do I fix this? The How do I fix this results for the low RSSI give recommendations to changing the RSSI threshold or adding more access points to mitigate potential coverage issues. Dashboard applications.
Once the root causes have been thoroughly investigated, click on the option for key correlations and you'll be shown a chart with the following client characteristics that are highly correlated with the poor application experience. From here, you can drill down into each of the options to learn more about the users that we're having, poor application experience, and to determine a potential reason for why.
Under dashboard connectivity, this is the first place to check for network disconnections. The main dashboard displays the total number of clients connected. Those that failed to associate authenticate or others that are experiencing network failures hovering over the network. Failure dis. Display gives additional data on what the cause of the network failure. In this case, the failure is with DHCP. Hovering over the online network display gives additional information on the total number of failed clients.
Search for a client name Vincent in this example, and you'll see the clients that match the string clients will be shown as authorized guest, rogue, external, or uncategorized.
This chart will show a lot of data about the given matching client. You can further click into the client explorer page to see additional data about clients according to the associated SSID vendor, capability Frequency Band, associated AP Mac address group, MLO, mode, channels, or authentication.
Client explorer is a pop-out window that shows all of the client devices sorted by assorted, by associated SSID by default.
Other visibility options or vendor capability channel associated AP Last failure reason, frequency ban, Google Auth Status Role operating system, MLO Mode Security Authentication channel. With Pairwise encryption and extended capability, all known clients can be displayed or just the live clients.
Link Explorer is a pop-out window that shows all of the client devices sorted by channel by default. Other visibility options are frequency band and channel width. A live view of the client links is the only option to be displayed.
Floor maps can be used to navigate through an enterprise by physical region. The sites show the number of connected clients and the number of clients who have failed to connect. When a site is clicked to get additional details on client connections, a small pop-up window is shown with further information on connectivity, performance, application experience, infrastructure devices, and the WIPs status of authorized or rogue access points and clients. Each menu section is clickable to obtain further information on the status of the devices system.
The connectivity testing can be configured to run at a given date or time when the testing has taken place. There is a record of the test results that are available for review.
Troubleshoot client connectivity test. There are three tabs, results, profiles and schedules. Client connectivity profiles can be set up to test various parameters of the client connection, and these tests can be scheduled to be run on a given day, date, or time.
Basic connectivity, proxy configuration, portal authentication, voiceover IP and throughput testing can be completed as well as several applications. Productivity, social communication or custom applications can be tested. The columns can be sorted by any of the headers.
There are nine built-in reports for compliance SOX wireless compliance, PCI DSS, wireless compliance, HIPAA, MITS, GLBA, PD DSS, and the DOD directive, 8100.2 compliance. These reports can be scheduled to be run at a set schedule or they can be run on demand.
Reports WIPs inventory, WIPs managed Wi-Fi devices, WIPs networks, WIPs access points, managed Wi-Fi device inventory, and WIPs. Clients are all reports can be run instantaneously or can be scheduled.
Reports, WIPs policies, enforcement airspace risk assessment, wireless vulnerability assessment, security status, wireless intrusion prevention summary, access point classification, client classification and WIPs. Alerts can be run on demand or scheduled. Reports. WS policies enforce.
The airspace risk assessment report is of good use as it gives a quick list of ad hoc networks, open access points, access points, running web or access points, running vulnerable SSIDs, meaning using security weaker than WPA 3.
Each of the report sections are expandable, clickable to obtain additional information about that section of the report reports, connectivity, Wi-Fi client's historical report. The report shows a client count summary and ranks the clients by the protocols, Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi wave one, legacy Wi-Fi, wave two and Wi-Fi 4, as well as the number of clients supporting Trib band, dual band, or single band reports applications, client application experience report.
The Wi-Fi Clients Historical report lists the number of clients that were successfully connected to the network and ranks them by the top, applications in use and the applications with the best experience as percentage of the time.
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