Wireless dashboard and charts

What it is

Wireless Monitor has two working views: the Overview tab (the whole fleet at a glance) and the detail view of a single AP (opened by clicking it in the sidebar). Both update in real time.

The Overview dashboard

The “Overview” tab is a grid of widgets you can rearrange, resize and hide with the Customize button (see below):

• Metrics — “Total APs”, “Online”, “Total Clients” and “Busiest AP”.
• AP Health Score — concentric rings for fleet-wide “Uptime”, “Latency” and “Loss”.
• Top 5 AP Rankings — the busiest or most loaded APs.
• Traffic charts — “Connected Clients” and “Bandwidth” for the fleet, each in its own widget so you can move, resize or hide them separately. Both carry the time pills “1h”, “4h”, “12h”, “24h”, “7d” and “30d” and the vendor filter; on “7d” and “30d” the tooltip shows the day as well as the time and the charts stop auto-refreshing, since each point already summarizes 15 to 30 minutes; the two bars stay in sync, so changing the range on one chart changes it on the other.
• 24h AP Availability Matrix — a heatmap with one row per AP: green means up, gaps show downtime at a glance.
• Quick Notes — a free-text pad for your own annotations about the wireless network.

Header actions: Customize (edit the widget layout), Fleet Report (printable report), Export CSV, Refresh All and New Tab (opens the overview in its own browser tab).

Customizing the widgets

The dashboard is locked by default, so nothing moves by accident. Click Customize to enter edit mode:

• Move a widget by dragging its title; resize it from the bottom-right corner or from its right and bottom edges (the handles are visible while you edit).
• Widgets opens a list with a checkbox per widget: untick one to hide it, tick it again to bring it back. A hidden widget stops requesting data until you show it again.
• Set as organization default (administrators only) saves the arrangement you are editing as the default for everyone in the organization, after a confirmation. It does not touch the arrangements colleagues already saved for themselves: it is what new users see, and what Restore default brings back.
• Restore default brings back the organization default if an administrator saved one, or the factory layout if not, and shows the hidden ones.
• Done saves your arrangement; Cancel discards every change made since you clicked Customize.

Your arrangement is personal and is stored on the server, so it follows you to any browser. Until you save one, you see the organization default set by an administrator, or the factory layout if there is none. On narrow screens (a phone, a tablet held upright, a half-width window) the widgets stack in a single column, and you can customize that order too: press Customize, drag widgets up or down by their title and hide the ones you do not need, then Done. That mobile arrangement is saved separately from the desktop one, so each keeps its own layout. Until you save one, the phone shows the widgets in the same order as your desktop layout. Administrators can also set an organization default for the mobile arrangement with Set as organization default while on a narrow screen.

Adding a chart for one AP

Besides the built-in widgets, you can pin the chart of any single AP to the Overview:

1. Click Customize, then Widgets.
2. At the top of the list, pick an AP in the first dropdown and a measure in the second one. The measures offered depend on the AP’s vendor, so you only see the ones that AP actually reports: “Station Count”, “AP Bandwidth”, “Channel Utilization”, “Noise Floor”, “Avg Data Rate”, “SNR”, “Channel”, “TX Power” or “Clients / Radio”.
3. Click Add chart. A new widget titled with the AP name and the measure appears in the grid.
4. Move and resize it like any other widget, then click Done to save it.

You can add up to 8 charts per dashboard, including several for the same AP; once you reach the limit, Add chart is disabled. These charts are not in the checkbox list: to get rid of one, click Customize and use the Remove button on the chart itself, then Done. Cancel undoes any chart you added or removed since you clicked Customize. The charts are part of your arrangement, so they are saved with it and come back, with the same AP and measure, when you reload the page or sign in from another browser. Each chart keeps its own measure selector, so you can switch measure without removing it; the widget title follows, and the change is kept if you make it while customizing and click Done. The BIG button on a chart opens the same expert view as in the AP detail: the chart full screen, with zoom, time ranges from “1h” to “30d”, print and PNG export. The desktop and mobile arrangements are separate: a chart added on a wide screen does not show on the phone until you add it there too.

Which clients get counted

“Total Clients” and “Busiest AP” only count APs that monitoring currently sees online. A line under the figure tells you how many APs are behind it — for example, “2 of 124 APs reporting live”.

This matters because client counts come from Deep Discover, which stores a snapshot of what the AP reported at that moment. That snapshot does not expire on its own, so an AP that has been down for weeks still holds its last known client list. Those clients stay visible in the AP’s own detail view — where they are clearly its last known state — but they are no longer added to the fleet total, which would otherwise present a weeks-old snapshot as if it were happening right now.

So if the total looks lower than you expect, read that second line first: a small number of reporting APs means most of the fleet is not being seen at the moment, not that your users disappeared.

The AP detail view

Click an AP in the sidebar. The header shows its status, name, IP, vendor, model and firmware, with these actions:

• Take out of Service / Return to Service — for equipment stored or switched off on purpose: it stays in the list greyed out, raises no alerts and does not count as offline, and it returns by itself when it answers ping again (see [[crearack—monitoring—que-es-observatory]]).
• Assign Port — link the AP to the switch port it hangs from (shows up under “Port Connection”).
• Config — edit the AP’s SNMP credentials and group membership.
• Report — printable report for this AP.
• Deep Discover — refresh the vendor-specific tables over SNMP (see [[crearack—wireless—deep-discovery-troubleshooting]]).

Below the header you get:

• Hardware — vendor, model, firmware, MAC address.
• Radios — one row per radio: band, channel, PHY rates.
• SSIDs — every network the AP announces, its security mode and client count.
• Connected Clients — client MAC, IP, signal strength (RSSI) and data rate.
• A chart grid you can customize with the Add Chart button. The pills above it set the time range for every chart in the grid: “1h”, “4h”, “12h”, “24h”, “7d” and “30d”. On “7d” and “30d” each point summarizes 15 to 30 minutes, the tooltip shows the day as well as the time, and the same two ranges are available in the AP’s Report and in the big chart you open by clicking a chart. Group tabs and the fleet dashboard offer the same six ranges. Next to Add Chart, a network dropdown lets you show the charts of a single WiFi network (see “Filtering the charts by network” below).

The expert view (BIG)

The BIG button on any chart opens it full screen, with zoom, the same time ranges, Print and Export PNG. The expert view always says whose data it is: under its title you see the AP name and IP address, or the group name when you opened it from a group tab.

Notes on the chart

In the expert view you can pin a note to a moment of the chart, so the team knows what happened there (“11:02 the venue switched the guest VLAN to the backup firewall”).

• Add a note: right-click on the chart at the moment you want, type the text (up to 1,000 characters) and click Save. The line under the statistics reminds you: Right-click the chart to add a note.
• What you see: a thin vertical line at that moment and a small numbered mark at the top of the chart (1, 2, 3… in time order), so the curve stays readable. Click the mark to open the note: text, author, date and time, and Edit / Delete if you may change it. Delete asks for confirmation inside the same box.
• The list below the chart: under the chart, Notes lists every note of the visible time range with the same numbers.
• Print and PNG: the marks are part of the chart, and the list of notes is added under the chart image, both when you Print and when you Export PNG (up to 50 notes in the image; if there are more, a last line says how many).
• Who sees them: notes are shared with everyone in your organization who can see Wireless. Anyone who can edit Observatory can add notes; a note can be edited or deleted by its author or by an admin.
• Good to know: on a phone there is no right-click, so notes cannot be added there yet. A note a teammate adds appears when you change the time range or open the chart again. The same name heads the printed page, the exported PNG carries it in a band at the top together with the chart, the time range and the date, and the PNG file name starts with it. That way a capture or an image you share can always be traced back to its AP or group. When the chart grid is filtered by a network, the expert view opens with that network and adds it after the name — for example “P1-Sala113 (192.168.231.55) · FABCON26 · VLAN 1764”.

Filtering the charts by network

An access point usually carries several WiFi networks at once — for example the event network, the speakers’ network and the venue’s own. When the AP reports its data per network, you can look at one of them on its own.

In the chart grid of an AP or of a group tab, the dropdown next to Add Chart shows “All networks” by default. It lists only the networks (VLANs) that the AP or group actually reports, with the name of their SSID and how many APs contribute data — for example “FABCON26 · VLAN 1764 (1 of 1 APs)”. A network whose SSID name the last Deep Discover did not record appears by its number only, such as “VLAN 338”. The networks with most clients come first.

Pick a network and:

• Station Count and AP Bandwidth show only that network, and their header says which one (“FABCON26 · VLAN 1764”). In a group, APs whose vendor does not report per-network data are left out; the “x of y APs” in the dropdown tells you how many are counted.
• Per-radio charts (“Channel Utilization”, “Noise Floor”, “Channel”, “TX Power”…) keep showing the whole access point, because a radio is shared by every network on it, and their header says “All networks”.
• The expert view (BIG) opens with the same network, as described above.

Your choice is remembered for each AP and each group in your browser. Pick “All networks” to go back to the whole access point.

Where to be careful:

• Per-network data starts when the site’s Local Agent runs version 2.30.0 or later, so there is no per-network history from before that.
• Today it is available for Xirrus (clients and traffic per network) and Cambium (clients per network). For other vendors, or before the first readings arrive, the dropdown is greyed out and its tooltip says “No per-network data yet for these access points”.

Available charts

Default panels: “Station Count”, “AP Bandwidth”, “Channel Utilization”, “Noise Floor”, “Clients / Radio” and “SNR”. You can also add “Avg Data Rate”, “Channel” and “TX Power”. Per-radio charts draw one series per radio so you can compare 2.4 GHz vs 5 GHz behavior.

Reading tips:

• A rising Noise Floor (less negative dBm) or a falling SNR usually means interference near the AP.
• Channel Utilization consistently above ~70% on one radio suggests moving clients or adding capacity.
• Station Count spikes plus Bandwidth flatlines can indicate an uplink bottleneck — check the switch port under “Port Connection”.

Related

• [[crearack—monitoring—que-es-wireless]] — module overview
• [[crearack—wireless—groups-and-reports]] — organize and report
• [[crearack—monitoring—metricas]] — how metrics are collected and stored

Véase también

• [[crearack—monitoring—que-es-wireless]]
• [[crearack—wireless—groups-and-reports]]
• [[crearack—monitoring—metricas]]