So we meet again
I been a bit swamp on the last couple weeks, but I wanted to take time today to tell you about a great tool I use a lot on my work; this is a public tool and can be used for anyone with a computer.
The tool is pretty self-explanatory in the installing and using (I will give a quick glance on that anyway); the tool gives you a lot of insight of your Cisco controllers configuration; here is he link to download and a quick tutorial.
As you might figure out it divides in two, AireOS and IOS-XE this articule will dedicate for AireOS software only.
WLCCA for AireOS
The tool needs to be installed on your computer, to use it, to do so you can do it as any other program, use the download link and use the setup.
Follow the installation instructions and open the program, it will look something like this
Now as the documentation says, it needs to use a “show run-config” output on a txt file and won’t work with backups done by tftp or show tech. So let’s load a config and see what do we get. Click in File -> Open, a new window will emerge; my suggestion here is leave it as default unless you’re using voice specialized devices (not computers or smartphones), click Ok.
Look for your data an select it, there is going to show you a loading screen and then the interesting output we are looking for, on the left menu you can find information about the controllers config you input (as the documentation says you can add more than one config file while opening it).
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to show you any specifics on the configuration I’m using since it’s confidential, but I think I can explain a bit on each point of the menu. To me it does seem intuitive and easy to navigate so I’m not going to fixate on explaining each one but maybe on some of the useful tricks I have found while exploring the tool.
Best practice check
My first recommendation is do not overlook the best practices part, it shows you a compliance level of the current best practices and you can even break it down to AP, General, Mobility, RF and security depending on what you’re interested. Now, remember this is NOT a must configuration that you should have and some of the values can be tweaked depending on your specific requirements but, the closer you’re to a 100% the more we can guarantee the network will perform on most cases.
Example of RF compliance check
Example of Security check:
Troubleshooting pointers
If you’re troubleshooting roaming issues, slowness and disconnections, I can give you some pointer you can verify from the config analyzer fairly quick and that will give you some insight, my examples are for 2.4 GHz but this applies for 5 GHz
Client distribution – SNR
Check how many client below 20-25 dBm you have on the WLC, anything below that:
Client distribution – RSSI
Similar to the SNR, if you see a low RSSI you might want to check your Tx power level or sticky client behavior.
Channel distribution
Check how evenly are the channels distributed on your AP groups, if you see something loaded to a few channels you can check the clean air for inference.
RF Health – AP groups
This will show you a summary of how many APs you have with low, medium, and high health. If you need more specifics for the bad health just open ap group in question and if find the bad health AP, double click on the name and you will be redirected to the RF status to that specific AP and will show what’s going on.
Charts
Now lets’ talk about some useful buttons on the Analyzer; did you can make charts of the RF statistics of the WLC? Click on the following button and you will get a new page, on the right menu you can select many options for charts that can be a graphical way to understand the information
I’m putting the channel examples but I recommend you to navigate around the graphs shown there and play with it a little bit check what you can find
AP graphs
You can even see the interaction of the APs to each other in a “who hears who” kind of matter. Mine will look like a conspiracy theory diagram due to the large number of APs but I encourage you to try it on smaller deployments, it can be pretty helpful.
Roaming prediction
Finally, I want to show you something that it’s a neat feature on the config analyzer and probably overlook, on the top menu there is a RF Analysis section, in there you can find a roaming prediction tool that if you click a set of neighbors it can predict how a client will roam (or should roam), you can even personalize things as the walk speed and the roaming RSSI values. I recommend you to try it, is pretty cool.
One last thing – Report Center
If it’s easier for you to look to this in excel to manipulate data, on the top menu on the report center you can export the information to many different formats, this can be easier on your eyes if you’re doing an deep analysis on many APs, keep it in mind.
P.S.
Well I wanted to show you about how I use this tool and the coolest features in it, this does not mean I talked about everything so again, I encourage to explore it on your own and do some simulated tshoots; the developer team put a great effort on this and to be honest it does perform amazingly for a “simple tool” so don’t sleep on it.
Reference articule: Cisco employee, "Wireless LAN Config analyzer", from developer.cisco.com,
Hope you enjoyed the post, the tool and the wireless world. Till next time
Dan Lopez
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