These dashboard charts represent four categories of statistics relevant to all wireless stations (a.k.a. wireless clients) on a controller and are designed to give you a real-time snapshot of the health of your wireless network. These four charts indicate the following across all wireless stations on your network:
The key to understanding the data in these charts is to use your mouse on a chart as follows. To interpret one if the 10 sections of a graph, hover your mouse over a bar on the chart. This shows you the data range for that section and the number of stations that fall within in that data range. Right-click on that same bar and select Show Details to see individual data for each station. From this list of stations, click Open in the Diagnostics column to see the same four statistical charts for just that individual station and also a real-time event log for that station. These charts automatically refresh every minute.
Tips on interpreting the graphs appear when you click Graph Help, such as descriptions for each chart and a numeric version of the chart information. To modify a graph setup, click Advanced.
This chart represents the distribution of each individual wireless station’s throughput over the range of the station with the lowest throughput and the station with the highest throughput. Throughput is defined as the sum of the transmitted and received bits-per-second for that station measured over the last two minutes. The data rate shown here in the Web UI cannot be generated from any one CLI command, but you can see the total bytes sent and received to an individual station using the command show statistics station-per-ap <apid> <macid>
Loss is defined as the percentage of 802.11 unicast packets transmitted from a AP to a station for which no 802.11 Ack is received. This chart represents the distribution of packet loss across all wireless stations on this controller over the last two minutes. Similarly to the Station Throughput chart, each bar represents a range of loss and how many stations fall within that range. The network is performing best when most stations are in the leftmost columns. There is a variable called AckFailCount kept for each wireless station and so the transmit loss percentage for all unicast data frames is calculated for each station using the formula: Loss Percentage = AckFailCount / (successful frames + AckFailCount) * 100 (%)
The colors in the chart are a clue to the relative health of the traffic, darkest green being the best result (low loss).
Airtime Fairness is a measure of the distribution of channel utilization across all stations on that channel. For example, when all stations have similar channel utilization, you can say that airtime fairness is at its best.
Channel Utilization is the percentage of air time consumed on a given channel. Each wireless station’s utilization of the channel is calculated in each AP by measuring the air time consumed by unicast frames transmitted to and received from that wireless station. The formula used to calculate channel utilization is: Channel Utilization = (TX_airtime_consumed + RX_airtime_consumed) / time_duration * 100 (%)
The channel utilization for each individual station is measured over the last minute.
Click Events to see a popup window with a list of diagnostic events such as IP address discovered, Station assigned, CP User authenticated, Encryption, DHCP ACK, 802.11 state, 1X authentication. Click Show Buffered Diagnostics to see a popup window with a list of diagnostic details.