How monitor Cisco AP load?

[Charlie Grey]

Question posted by 1 customer i dunno how to ans.

controller is C9800 wlc.

is there any way or how to monitor an AP load and get notify before clients wifi connections performance start going south??

[eglinsky2012]

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@Rich R wrote:

We are currently using this to detect a problem we're seeing quite frequently on 17.12.4 where the AP just stops taking connections on the 5GHz radio.  We look for APs with clients on 2.4 but zero on 5GHz as possibly affected and then reload as needed (reload fixes the problem until next failure).

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Interesting, we had those exact same symptoms on 9166s and 9130s but opposite of you, they started on 17.12.4a (APSP8) and stopped on 17.12.4 (APSP2). The bug was CSCwj45141. There may have been another bug as well. What AP models are affected now?

Through another community, I've heard of 9105W 5 GHz radios not taking clients as of 17.12.4 (before and after APSP2). Their 3802i/p, 9120i/e, 9164i, and 1815w models seem unaffected. That individual is aware of another case, and another community member thinks they're seeing it as well. In my case, during the day, I seem to have a constant 86 out of 318 9105Ws that have 0 clients (assuming Prime is working correctly*), but I keep forgetting to check in the evening when the students are actually in their rooms.

*Edit: Apparently it's not (no surprise there); I checked the numbers by CLI and it fluctuated from 52 to 59. I'll check in the evening to confirm how many have no clients.

[Rich R]

CSCwj45141 is tagged Unreproducible - not very helpful - despite 14 customer cases attached!

We seem to be seeing it all on 9105AXI so far.

[Leo Laohoo]

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@Rich R wrote:
We seem to be seeing it all on 9105AXI so far.

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@Rich R, @eglinsky2012, 

Does it help if the APs are rebooted?

[eglinsky2012]

@Leo LaohooOut of a sample of 6 APs I just rebooted that had no wired or wireless clients, only 1 gained a few 5 GHz clients after rebooting. It's 6:45pm on a college campus, so the other rooms may be vacant at the moment. I'll have to check later in the evening to see how many have no clients then.

During the day, I saw 52 then 59 with no clients (out of 318). Now there are 49.

[Leo Laohoo]

I am not sure if this is going to be relevant, but APs can be "scheduled" to reboot (turn PoE off/on) by leveraging EnergyWise: 

energywise domain [HAKUNA MATATA] security shared-secret [PASSWORD]
energywise importance 60

!  Interface
interface range 
 energywise level 10 recurrence importance 70 time-range POWER_ON
 energywise level  0 recurrence importance 70 time-range TURN_OFF
 energywise importance 60

!  Time Range Power ON
time-range POWER_ON
 absolute start 00:00 20 October 2024
   periodic weekdays 8:00 to 20:00

!  Time Range Power OFF
time-range TURN_OFF
 absolute start 00:00 20 October 2024
   periodic weekdays 20:00 to 23:59
   periodic weekdays  0:00 to  8:00

[Rich R]

Very useful thanks Leo - customer is now asking for regular reloads so this will come in handy.

We've also used kron for this type of thing before or EEM using a cron event.

[Rich R]

Yes Leo - reboot recovers it - at least until the next time it happens ...

[jagan.chowdam]

You can monitor wireless health up to some extend with Meraki Dashboard, when you add C9800 controller to it.

https://documentation.meraki.com/Cloud_Monitoring_for_Catalyst/Getting_Started/Monitoring_Catalyst_Wireless_9800_Controllers

https://community.cisco.com/t5/networking-knowledge-base/introducing-cloud-monitoring-for-catalyst-wireless/ta-p/5084755

Without Catalyst Center/Meraki Cloud dashboard, you may want to look at third party sensors such as https://wyebot.com/

Jagan Chowdam

/**Pls rate useful responses**/