Say what you will about PI (and I say plenty, sometimes under my breath), there is a lot packed into this Network Management System. One of my favorite features for remotely characterizing how individual APs see each other may not be so obvious, so a quick show and tell is provided here.
The goal? Let me:
- see a floorplan with APs on it
- ask any one of those APs how it sees it’s neighbors from the radio perspective as they are all mounted
- show me one band at a time
- show me signal strengths of APs on the same floorplan, and NOT on the same floorplan
And as a bonus- show me a slew of radio specific data for any AP’s individual radios.
Before the run-through, a quick note on when I use this functionality… In areas where RRM is allowed to do it’s thing, this is a handy way to let the radios themselves tell you how they see their places in the RF world in relation to each other. Where RRM is over-ridden for whatever reason, this becomes one more sanity-check data point on whether you got the intra-AP power settings right. What this does NOT do- does not show you the system from client device perspective, and so is only part of the bigger picture. But is a handy one at that…
Got it? Then here we go.
- Monitor\Site Maps\specific building\specific floor
- Select an AP, drill into one of it’s radios
- Notice the radio details in table form. Good stuff, sure… now click into “View RX Neighbors”
- The example AP is on 5th floor. It sees one other AP on the same floor, and two more from the floor below, at discreet strengths. You get a sense of propagation with this simple view through walls and floors if you know the power levels in play. Again, is one more place to gain a useful data point or two in complicated environments that gets beyond just heatmap juju.
- Then there’s the click into all of the radio data available for a given interface
- And behold- all of the RF stuff you might need for troubleshooting, contemplating RF changes, etc. (Yes, this info can also be accessed from Monitor AP path).
Nothing earth-shaking here, but I’ve met enough fellow PI users that are either new to the platform or who just didn’t know about these features that sharing seemed prudent.
Thanks for reading!
wirednot 
One of the biggest benefits for me is that when I view RX neigbors of an AP in Prime, it translates the MAC address to the actual AP name. On the WLC(at least in 7.x code), you have to know the MAC address of the AP to make any sense of it.
Excellent point made by you, Matthew- thanks for reading and the input.
Keep in mind that the information you see is how the APs see each other at max power and 1mbps (rrm messages).
Thanks, Akirs. I can’t say that I agree as you describe it, but am happy to learn, Do you have a reference for this?
Sorry for the late response.
You can find this in most of any of the WLC configuration guides under the RRM sections. But here is from tech notes:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/controller/technotes/7-4/RRM_DG_74.html
Scroll down to where it explains NDP