Report for RF spectrum.

twilber
New here

Report for RF spectrum.

Basically I am looking for a way to take a snapshot of the current channel utilization for all of my WAPs company wide. Like the information that you can view on the RF Spectrum page, but in the form of a report. Is there any way I can do this. I've looked everywhere and can't seem to find a way.

5 Replies 5
BrechtSchamp
Kind of a big deal

There's no report like that at the moment I'm afraid, also no API calls to aid in the process. In the RF spectrum page you can see which APs are having high channel utilization. That should make it easier to focus on the problem cases.

MerakiDave
Meraki Employee
Meraki Employee

Not today, but perhaps that's a good wish and feature request, you're trying to get an Organization-Wide type of RF spectrum report?  So you can see at an Org level, if any individual networks are reporting unhealthy RF?  Today you have the Organization > Summary Report page to provide various types of wireless reporting, but this doesn't include any info today on RF channel utilization.  

 

The Wireless > Monitor > RF Spectrum page in Dashboard is just that (network-wide) for the simple reason that each Dashboard network (and therefore each wireless network) is meant to be its own AutoRF domain.  Take a K12 Dashboard organization for example, where the best and common practice is to have one Dashboard network for each school.  That also means there's one AutoRF domain per school, which is a good thing because the different school buildings are out of RF range from one another, and we don't want RF conditions in a high school impacting channel and power settings in a middle school for example.  I have seen deployments where there is a single district-wide wireless network, and that tends to work ok, but is definitely less than ideal and not best practice.  

 

So that's a long-winded way of saying that things like RF spectrum analysis needs to be network-by-network, that is, for a given AutoRF domain.  This is why when you first bring up the Wireless > Monitor > RF Spectrum page in Dashboard, you see a simple type of summary report across all the APs for both 2.4 and 5GHz radios, to at least get a high level idea of the health of the RF for that network.  That same page also has a search box so you can dynamically filter which APs you're looking at, like if you wanted to see overall RF health in one wing of a building, and the AP were named in a way to allow that kind of simple filtering.  

 

Still, I like the idea and will look to see if there's a feature request in place for adding an alerting mechanism perhaps, also at the network-wide level, if APs start suddenly detecting unhealthy RF conditions for example.  Just wanted to understand how you were looking to leverage such a feature.

 

Nash
Kind of a big deal

Thank you for the insight, @MerakiDave. My company's default had been to create a single wireless network for organizations with multiple sites, but I'm now thinking that we shouldn't oughta do that. Especially not for sites that have multiple types of Meraki equipment. (Most commonly - MX and APs.)

 

Our thinking had been that it makes it easier to broadcast the same SSIDs across multiple sites. But how hard is it to setup the same SSID, really? Especially when the clients don't want PSKs changed regularly.

 

We don't have a lot of large deployments right now, but we will in the near future. I'm going to start a team discussion about creating a new standard to put us in a better position for when that happens.

BrechtSchamp
Kind of a big deal


@Nash wrote:

 

Our thinking had been that it makes it easier to broadcast the same SSIDs across multiple sites. But how hard is it to setup the same SSID, really? Especially when the clients don't want PSKs changed regularly.

Probably a good use case for templates!
Nash
Kind of a big deal

Haha, yeah, it is. I just have to talk others into using them when "that's not how we've always done it."

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