Blog
In this article we cover five ways you can use 7SIGNAL’s Wi-Fi optimization solutions to improve the performance of your large-scale Wi-Fi deployments. We discuss how 7SIGNAL enables you to measure KPIs across your network, identify issues impacting different service areas, determine root causes of service interruptions, take inventory of user devices, and more.
Here’s how 7SIGNAL can help you optimize your large-scale Wi-Fi deployment:
- Measuring Network KPIs
- Identifying Issues by Service Area
- Uncovering Root Causes of Bad Connectivity Experiences
- Assessing Devices and Device Configurations
- Determining if Your Network Is 6E-Ready
- See It in Action: 7 Minutes with 7SIGNAL
Want to learn more about the 7SIGNAL platform? Chat with our sales team!
1. Measuring Network KPIs
First up, having insight into key network performance indicators is essential for ensuring that your users enjoy high-quality connectivity experiences when accessing your Wi-Fi environment. Of course, for larger, more complex deployments, that’s typically easier said than done.
If your Wi-Fi environment is composed of numerous offices operating in multiple cities or countries, you need some way to monitor the individual access points, rooms, offices, campuses, and storefronts that compose your global network. You also need a solution capable of providing you with enough depth of insight that you can make informed optimization decisions without necessarily having to travel to the affected area and troubleshoot in person.
This is where 7SIGNAL comes to the rescue. With Sapphire Eye you can see what’s going on across your entire environment from a single dashboard. Check it out:
This dashboard shows the performance of individual service areas within a single large-scale Wi-Fi deployment. Each of the green bars represents a different KPI being tracked.
7SIGNAL lets you customize these KPIs according to your requirements, enabling you to monitor things like IP address accessibility, Wi-Fi performance, airtime utilization, and more.
Moreover, in the event that you do see something peculiar, you can click on the underperforming network and identify which access point(s) are causing the issue. Like so:
With this information, you can begin troubleshooting the access point and ameliorate the issue before it causes more trouble or becomes endemic.
To make things even easier, you can set alerts and alarms to tell you automatically when any network or access point underperforms. These can be set for syslogs, webhooks, emails, etc.
2. Identifying Issues by Service Area
Taking things a step further, you can use 7SIGNAL’s Best/Worst dashboard to measure access point performance over time in different service areas. See here:
As you can see, this dashboard provides a list of access points operating in a particular service area and indicates how each one is performing. You can use it to track KPIs like Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) time, DHCP success rate, Ping success rate, HTTP download throughput, and more.
This dashboard enables continuous system improvement, Wi-Fi assurance, and performance optimization at the service area level.
3. Uncovering Root Causes of Bad Connectivity Experiences
Next up, just because you know where your network is underperforming doesn’t mean you know why it’s doing so. With 7SIGNAL, you can analyze service-level agreements (SLAs) and determine whether performance issues stem from your infrastructure or from the Wi-Fi more broadly. Indeed, the SLA dashboard enables you to look deeper into service interruptions and uncover root causes of particular issues. Here’s what the dashboard looks like:
You can use it to measure Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) success rates, DHCP success rates, Domain Name System (DNS) querying, and more. This will help you decide if bad access point performance is due to a wired network issue, a network service issue, or a Wi-Fi issue.
4. Assessing Devices and Device Configurations
Moving on. Let’s look at how 7SIGNAL can help you assess Wi-Fi experience at the device level. Here’s the 7SIGNAL Mobile Eye dashboard, which can be used to see how your network is performing from the perspective of user devices operating within your environment:
No matter how well you set up your Wi-Fi infrastructure, users will always have varying experiences when connecting to your network. This is because every user accesses it for different reasons with different devices in countless different contexts. While you may do your best to accommodate all possible use cases, that’s not exactly an easy task. Some devices are just weak because of how they're designed, whether it be their antennas, adapters, drivers, etc.
However, with 7SIGNAL’s Mobile Eye dashboard, which provides graphs like the one above, you can zero in on specific devices or device configurations and identify if any are simply poor performers.
For example, see the charts below:
All of the HP devices highlighted look great (the areas in green indicate good performance, while the areas in yellow and red indicate that there are some issues). However, the Panasonic devices are a different story:
To dig a little deeper, you can click on the Panasonic devices and analyze them individually:
You’ll notice then that it’s not all Panasonic devices, just some versions. You can take this information, inform Panasonic device holders of the issue, and use it to inform future network or device fleet upgrades.
5. Determining if Your Network Is 6E-Ready
Finally, one question that often arises is, “Is my environment ready for Wi-Fi 6E?” Of course, while a large part of leveraging 6E is a question of network hardware (access points, routers, etc), your users will also need 6E-capable clients.
With 7SIGNAL you can track your entire device population and conduct an inventory on 6E-capable devices. This will help inform your decision-making regarding when you can upgrade and redesign your network to accommodate 6E.
For example, here’s an inventory of devices on a network:
To see how many are 6E-capable, go to the adapters and drivers of interest and do a little filtering:
In this case, we discovered that, out of 1,101 devices, just 161 are capable of getting onto 6E networks:
So, maybe making the leap isn’t the best option for this particular network. While this may not be ideal from a Wi-Fi experience standpoint, it’s better to have this information on hand before you invest in upgrading your network to 6E.
And that's why monitoring is essential: so you can keep tabs on your environment and make informed decisions.
SEE IT IN ACTION: 7 Minutes with 7SIGNAL
Eric Camulli, VP and Customer Success Officer at 7SIGNAL, covered the subject above in a recent segment on our weekly webinar. You can watch the full recording here:
Learn More From the 7SIGNAL Experts
We’re always here to answer your Wi-Fi questions at 7SIGNAL. Our enterprise Wi-Fi optimization platform helps you plan and execute a healthier network. Contact us to learn more.
7SIGNAL® is the leader in enterprise Wi-Fi optimization, providing insight into wireless networks and control over Wi-Fi performance so businesses and organizations can thrive. Our cloud-based platform continually tests and measures Wi-Fi performance at the edges of the network, enabling fast solutions to digital experience issues and stronger connections for mission-critical users, devices, and applications. Learn more at www.7signal.com.