Real time radio utilization monitoring across multiple AP's at a glance?

[willsmith1701]

Is there a way, using either Prime 3.0, or the 3850 controller ios-xe 03.06.05E interface, or a combination of both, to view real time radio utilization?

We will be testing an application buildingwide, and I need to be able to see at a glance, in realtime, what the utilization of each AP radio is, and how many clients are connected to each radio, across multiple AP's, preferably without having to drill down to each individual AP to see the statistics.

Is there a way to do this? If it's not possible using native Cisco tools, are there any 3rd party applications that will do this?

[George Stefanick]

Go to prime map where aps are placed and filter on utilization yiu and also filter on client count as well. 

[willsmith1701]

Ok ,Thanks.

 At what percentage of utilization does performance start to be affected? 30%? At what level is the radio considered saturated?

[George Stefanick]

I think you will have folks answer this question with different numbers. I try a sleep mine under 50%. 2.4 is hard to work those numbers unless you turn off radios. When it's hits 70% you should notice some throughput issues. 

Also you can run these commands per ap 

show ap auto-rf 802.11b <ap name>

show ap auto-rf 802.11a <ap name>

[willsmith1701]

OK, thanks again.  Would you happen to know if there's a bug in Prime 3.1 regarding rx and tx utilization? Both rx  and tx utilization is showing 0% on all  AP's, on both bands, which doesn't seem possible. It is showing some channel utilization in the 2.4 band.  Is there something I need to configure in Prime to get RX and TX utilization statistics?

[George Stefanick]

The RX/TX is a measurement of what that radio is sending or receiving. The utilization is what the radio sees in its area.

[willsmith1701]

What I don't understand is how an AP with 40 plus clients associated can show a TX and RX utilization of 0. Almost all of the AP's buildingwide are showing 0 RX and TX utilization, as though the wireless network is unused.  Some clients have got to be sending or receiving over the AP's radio. It makes me question the validity of the statistics. 

[George Stefanick]

Run that command on the controller. see what that shows ..

[willsmith1701]

I did.  The output of "show ap name (ap-name) auto-rf dot11 5ghz" on the controller showed 0% TX and 0% RX utilization with 44 attached clients.  Yet the command "show wireless client client-statistics summary | include (ap-name) will show the number of TX and RX packets for every client connected to the AP.  It seems like there is something wrong with the global RX and TX utilization counters in 3850 code version 03.06.05E.