Howw to add 9800 virtual wlc to Solarwinds and set up alerting for 9124 APs?

Question

Good afternoon

We have a Cisco 9800 Virtual WLC. I have  9120 and 9124 APs connected to it. I was trying to find out what the steps are for adding it to Orion  so that I can monitor and get alerts for the APs. We have a cisco 5508 WLC thats a regular box and I can see that one in Solarwinds fine. Just trying to get the steps needed to added the virtual WLC. Our server guy can assist with any info relating to the VM side of things.

robert.scarborough · Answer

Ok thanks and I will take a look at this and update. Appreciate the help

stuartd · Answer

We don't have a 9800 but we do have several other Cisco WLCs virtual and physical but the principle should be 1the same.

The node (WLC in this case) needs to be added via SNMP. Once added, you may want to double check on the 'node details' page that it is recognised as a WLC....

If not, click 'Edit Node' and then scroll down to 'View Type'. It is probably set to (default)

But you can force it to use another template. The best being:

If it has just been added, then you will need to leave time for SW to do its poll and 'pick up' the APs. Depending on if you've edited your template then you may or may not see a widget on the page with the APs associated to that controller. But, the best way to see the APs would be to go to the dedicated 'Wireless' page. You can pick and choose what to filter on from there, but one of the key ones would be 'Controller'.

Alerting is fairly straight forward using as @weston.hood suggests, the built-in alert. Personally speaking I would duplicate & edit that and customise to your environment.

A couple of caveats....

1. I have found that  down AP alerts don't always appear as down. They might be unknown, or disassociated, so we edited the trigger to look like this:

Note it says: is NOT equal to

2. We have found that AP alerting is problematical due to the way SW works. In short, an AP goes down and SW spots that. On the next poll cycle it sees it is still down and removes said AP from its DB.

The issue with this is if your "condition must exist for x minutes" exceeds the poll cycle then you will never see an alert. The fix is to go into SW advanced config [ YourServer/orion/Admin/AdvancedConfiguration/Global.aspx ]and wait for it to load. In the search box type: RemoveDisappearedAPs and you will see this, but with the box ticked.

Un-tick that box and then click SAVE.

The downside to this is that it now generates duplicate APs. i.e. AP01 triggers a down and alerts as expected and is seen as down with a red-blob. Sometime later, it returns to service but SW sees it as a new AP and creates a new instance of AP01. You will need to manually (by hand or scripted) go into the DB and remove the old down.

Other than this - it works fine

robert.scarborough · Answer

I have been pulled away to do a bunch of other projects. I was able to add the wlc to solarwinds but not sure if I did it right. I dont see any APs listed anywhere. May have missed a step. I will delete and maybe start all over if needed. I just want to be able to see all APs on WLC and detect when they go down.