Radio channel set on AP

[jessie.wang1]

Lately, we got a lot of " Reason: Radio channel set. Failure Source: AP , Interface 802.11b/g/n"  from some APs. Do you have any idea?

Thank you

Jessie

[Brent Cook]

Did you ever find a resolution for this?  We upgraded from Prime 2.2 to 3.0 and started receiving these about once an hour for different AP's in our environment.  TAC recommendation was to change the level for AP disassociated from controller from critical to something lower as this "reason" for the alert is under that setting.  The only issue I have with that is that now if an AP dies or has trouble, the only way we will know about it is to log into prime and look at the alerts.  This seems pretty obnoxious and I'm wondering what version of prime you are running to experience this as I didn't see it in 2.2.2

[PhilMueller]

We recently upgraded to Prime 3.0 also and I am seeing the same thing with these messages.  The purpose for the alerts to me is to see if AP's are dropping so I do not want to change the settings for the alerts.  Is the "Radio Channel Set" mean that the radio on that sepecific AP goes down then comes back up because it changed channels?  It would be nice to know what it means especially if the radio is going down.  We have alot of 7925's in our environment so radios going down frequently is not a good thing.

[Brent Cook]

Phil - Thanks for posting your experience with it..  I've been working with TAC on this and can provide you some info from our discovery so far.. 

The channel set indeed means that the AP has switched channels, however.. the AP's let the clients know to follow with it and thus it's not actually dropping the clients.  We also use 7925's in our environment and not only with those, an AP shutting down it's radio in the middle of the day and disconnecting clients would be highly unacceptable. 

An example of where the radio does actually go down is the other alerts that I was getting were with a "reason" of "Rogue Location Discovery Protocol stop".. The AP radio gets shut down, it listens for rogue AP's and attempts to connect to them if they are open.  I was told that this doesn't happen if you have monitor AP's.  From a security standpoint, it doesn't need this feature to detect rogues and pick up if they are on the network so I have this disabled.

While working with TAC, we still haven't figured out which setting affects the radio channel set message though.  I did turn on the option for including the category in the body of email and am waiting for another notice to come out..  If you want to check that, go to Administration > Settings > System Settings > Alarms and Events > Alarms and Events and go to the Alarm Email Options section. Make sure that “Include alarm condition in body of email” is checked...

I'm in the same boat as you are though with the alerts, I can't just disable the notification for the category because the ENTIRE point of having that notification is to know when the radios in the AP's go down for bad purposes, right?  :)

I'll post what I find, but if you can share details you run into as well it will be appreciated.

[Brent Cook]

Appears I found it....

PI has detected one or more alarms of category AP and severity Critical in Virtual Domain ########### for the following items:

1. Alarm Condition:Radio administratively up and operationally down

Message: '802.11a/n/ac' interface of AP '###############' associated to controller '############### (###.###.###.###)' is down. Reason: Radio channel set.

Failure Source: AP ###############, Interface 802.11a/n/ac

E-mail will be suppressed up to 30 minutes for these alarms.

[PhilMueller]

Thanks for the response.  I did turn on the condition in the email which is a nice feature.  Its also good to know that when the radio does change channels that the clients do not drop.  I think I am going to take some time and run some debugs on the AP's that are constantly showing up in the alarms and open a TAC case myself.  I will keep you posted.

[Brent Cook]

I will be inquiring as to what else is covered under the alert "radio administratively up and operationally down" from TAC.  I will post their reply here and also be shifting that from critical down to major as a test to see if the alerts stop.  Will also post the results from my test. 

Hopefully if this is the result it helps out others as well.  When I was googling for information I wasn't coming up with much.

Keep you posted as well.

[Sheraz.Salim]

We recently upgrade to Prime 3.0 from version 1.3 we are getting too many email on these alerts any help would be appriciate to narrow them down.

[Brent Cook · Accepted solution]

go to Administration > Settings > System Settings > Alarms and Events > Alarms and Events and go to the Alarm Email Options section. Make sure that “Include alarm condition in body of email” is checked... this will help you troubleshoot what category is causing alerts going forward.

The "Radio channel set" message is generated from the alert "Radio administratively up and operationally down".  Change it's severity from critical to major and you will no longer receive the alerts on it. 

Other items affected by this change per TAC:

“Radio administratively up and operationally down” is thrown any time that you’ve enabled a radio for an AP, but its showing down for some reason. Here’s a (not-comprehensive) list of things that could cause it (I’m just going to make the assumption that we’re talking about 802.11a, but the same would follow for the other radio):
• Radio enabled on AP, but network (i.e. 802.11a) disabled
• Radio enabled on AP, but AP admin status disabled
• Radio enabled on AP, but is restarting due to a RRM or DFS triggered channel change (this is what looks to be happening in your network)
• Radio enabled on AP, but is actually dead

I have gotten rid of the constant flow of alerts by changing the severity of that one alert, hopefully this helps you and others out.

[Sheraz.Salim]

Thank you for your prompt reply. In my case i was getting too many alerts because many of the option were check in Alarm and setting.

For example. in Alarm Email Options "Include alarm severity, Include alarm Category" by unchecking them. now it is only giving me the alert when any of the ap go down/up.

I do appriciate for your input what you have suggested. I shall look into them and will get back to you sometime tomarrow.

[Craig Le-Butt]

Hi

Did you get any further with this?

I ran version 2.1, 2.2 and 3 next to each other when upgrading, Ver 3 only got the new alerts.

cheers

[Brent Cook]

The response I posted above is the end result/solution to that annoying alert. I will copy/paste just the directions again.

Go to Administration > Settings > System Settings > Alarms and Events > Alarm Severity and Auto Clear... On the right side under Wireless > AP scroll down and find "Radio administratively up and operationally down".  Change it's severity from critical to major and you will no longer receive the alerts on radio channel changes.

Also a note on prime 3.0, I tried 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 and they broke more stuff than they fixed.  I would not recommend upgrading away from 3.0 right now at all unless you have to.  Cheers!

[jvegaare]

Thank you Brent