Do you own Cisco's LWAPP? If so, do you own Cisco's WCS? Finally, if you own WCS, what kind of integration would you like to see between WSC and Orion?
Do you own Cisco's LWAPP?
Yes, I have several Cisco Wireless LAN Controllers and many LWAPP AP's
If so, do you own Cisco's WCS?
Yes, we currently run Cisco Wireless Control System to manage and monitor our wireless network
Finally, if you own WCS, what kind of integration would you like to see between WSC and Orion?
To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure what type of integration is even possible since I don't believe WCS can be queried via SNMP or WMI for information related to the wireless network. If there was some level of integration, I'd like to see the inclusion of the heat maps created in WCS into Orion, in addition to the obvious information already collected via Solarwinds Wireless Monitor for FAT access points.
I will admit I'd like to see rouge APs, Alarms, and Coverage Holes too.
I am purchasing a WiSM Module for my 6500 (it's a WLC Controller Module), and WCS this week. It would be interesting to know what information can be pulled from WCS/WLC to the wireless network monitor. Maybe things like info on connected clients, what ap's they're assigned to, what access points are assigned to which WLCs, and maybe links to NCM to get to the configs of thw WLCs or their respective switches (6500 or 3750). Some other basic AP info would be power and antenna power levels, basic syslog info from supported devices, and maybe a connection to the heatmaps or location maps that are in the WCS-Location SKU. I don't know how mch of this is possible, but it would be great to see.
I would like to pry into this a little more. What is your reasoning for wanting to integrate Orion Wireless Module with WCS? Do you just not want two systems hitting the wireless devices?
We are testing lightweight with WCS right now, but don't have a large deployment...
If we can get maps, that would be great. Not too concerned about the heat maps myself. Things like # of clients, # of errors either wirelessly on on its uplinks. Maybe who is on it.
Definitely what AP's are connected, whether they are up or not, whether their radios are up. Maybe allow it to link back to WCS for further reporting, but only if the user is permitted that, we don't allow all users into WCS.
This is an uncomfortably short thread for such an important subject. Denny did you get all the feedback you were looking for? I know you plan to roll this out the first part of this year.
We've reached out to many customers, and to be honest, a lack of strong response is itself informative.
Ok.. well as long has you have what you need.
I was content with what you told me in an earlier post that you plan to support at least the same level of functionality that was available with the autonomous ap's in particular the historical association history information with signal strengths.. etc..
WCS is limited to about a 3 day history for this information unless you invest in the location manager.
To be honest I'd love Orion integration just for the advanced reporting capabilities that WCS is sorely lacking on. Being able to provide a weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual report of wireless authenticated (not just probing) users would be very helpfull. Also this would allow direct monitoring of the WAP's themselves for alerting when they go down along with bandwidth graphing of the uplink ports of the WAP's for the N devices.
There are many benefits that would be fantastic, please bring integrate it!!!
We own have 25 LWAPPs at 8 sites in 5 states with 5 different SSIDs running on our WAN.
We are using a 4402 WLC to control them all.
Right now I have some custom pollers set up to give me some basic information like the number of users logged into each of my SSIDs. What I would like if possiable is the number of users logged in per SSID per LWAPP.
Also, I would like some kind of performace monitoring per LWAPP not just for the whole system.
In addition I would like to be able to connect Map objects to each LWAPP and get the information for that LWAPP when it is selected.
We currently have four Controllers, WCS and about 90 LWAPP's with 20 more Controllers and conversion of all 400+ AP's to lightweight. It is a critical path item for us to have integration between the controller and Orion to keep the wireless module installed.
Something like WCS/LWAPP support seems like it should be in your standard roadmap and not a result of postings on thwack.
We are adding Controller/Thin AP support in the first half of the year
I was told that you are able to provide the same level of functionality for the lwapp ap's as is currently provided for the autonomous ap's in the new release?
Can you confirm this or was this just idle speculation?
We have Cisco 4402 controllers and WiSMs running LWAPP to @45 locations. We currently have WCS deployed.
As far as an integration, i'd be happy to start with basic information similar to the stats and features you'd have in NPM for the APs but be able to get the information in the Orion website. It's much easier for me to filter events and alert from Orion. Honestly we only use WCS as a central place to configure the controllers and APs. Beyond that, it's not a very user friendlt App to me.
We have 105 LWAPP's deployed, WCS server, 2 Wism blades with 2 controllers each, and 1 stand alone 4402 controller.
The version 9.5 wireless tab is a great addition and seems great compared to WCS in terms of spilling the information out that you asked for.
A few requests from the first 24 hours of review.
1) Since the AP's can be individually identified now in this release, can we add them to a SNMP location other than unknown?
2) Can LWAPP's be added as a Cisco device to be added to the Atlas feature? Right now they are in our maps as unknown ICMP only devices.
This latest release is awesome so far, thanks!
On item # 1 do you mean the controllers or the thin AP's?
I have the second item logged as an enhancement request. The method you have posted is the only way around this right now, which is to add them as ICMP nodes
On Item 1, I meant the thin client AP's individually.
We have LWAPP's about - 220, around 50 Cisco Wireless Controllers, Cisco Wireless Control System v5... and Orion's Wireless Network Monitor. We'd would really like to integrate the Wireless Management into Orion. Where to start??
Thanks, Kevin
So with 9.5 we integrated Wireless Management into NPM including support for controllers, are you still on 9.1?
Currently Running 9.1 . I should probably make plans to move to 9.5 from what you're saying?
I would, just want to make sure I was clear, with 9.5 the wireless monitor is EOL and we re-wrote and rolled alot of that functionality into NPM and added controller and thin AP support for Cisco and Aruba. You might want to watch this here for more info, choose the Managing 802.11 networks video
