Support for monitoring Aruba wireless controllers was added to most recent release of Nectus NMS. It brings visibility to most loaded wireless APs, SSIDs and controllers.
It displays basic antenna info, current AP channels, gives list of rogue APs and rogue clients and allows generation of Wireless HeatMaps over floorplans.
After support for wireless devices was added in Nectus, specific monitoring dashboards were created to track any change that can affect the wireless users, controllers or access points.
The wireless dashboards are vendor specific and this is where you can find the dashboard for Cisco wireless devices:
The focus of this article is on Cisco wireless devices, this is how the Cisco wireless dashboard looks like:
Wireless dashboard has multiple sections.
One of the sections covers the controllers and can provide information about the CPU usage, how many APs are Up, Down or Downloading:
As always, you can get device details by selecting the controller:
The interesting things starts when you select the counters related to the number of APs that are up, down or in process of being associated with the controller.
You get a list of APs in that state associated with that specific controller:
To get details about an AP, it is enough to select one of the APs and a window with multiple tabs will provide various information that can help the operator to understand how that specific AP operates.
The first tab provides the name of AP assigned by the operator, the model of AP, the operating system, the IP address and some other useful information about the AP.
The next tab provides technical information about the two frequencies in which the AP operates:
In the next tab, quality of service settings are covered:
The forth tab is about the load in terms of number of clients, receive and transmit utilization for the frequencies supported:
The next tab shows the rogue APs detected:
You can also see the neighbor APs and some of their characteristics:
And the last tab shows the CDP neighbor:
Another section of the wireless dashboard is the SSID Client load which shows how many clients are on each SSID:
The wireless dashboard allows to see how many clients and on which frequency each AP has:
And the last section of the wireless dashboard is the one showing how many clients are on the two frequencies, 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, in total and you can see some history of how many clients were at some point in time.
Nectus Cisco Wireless dashboard can provide useful information about the wireless devices, controllers and access points.
In this post we will cover some new functionality added to Nectus in latest Wireless release.
The “Wireless Client Search” allows the operator to find any wireless client by its MAC, IP address or Username.
The client search is located under main menu “Tools”:
In the menu, you have an option to search for a client based on the MAC, IP or Username. You can also restrict the scope where the search will take place:
Here is how a result of a MAC search looks like. You can search using part of a MAC address as well, but you need to provide at least 3 characters (two numbers and “:” )
You can view the client details by clicking either on MAC address or IP address and the new window will show Client’s basic info like like SSID, RSSI etc.:
The second tab will show the RSSI from various APs that detects client’s signal:
If AP name is clicked, then you will get detailed information about the AP:
Next, you can search for an IP address (again, you do not have to specify full IP address):
The last option is to search using an username:
The username is shown in the client detailed information:
Coming back to the search window, there is the possibility to track a client. You actually track the MAC address of the client to see if and where the client roamed across the wireless network. One or more clients can be tracked in the same time:
You need to specify how often Nectus should check this MAC address and for how long. If you know the client goes on and off often or it moves around the wireless network, then you might want to use an aggressive timer for frequency to get accurate data about availability:
The list of the tracked clients can be seen here:
And the list is this:
A client can be added for tracking from this menu as well:
And here is how the tracking information looks like for a client:
This shows that the client did not move to another AP, so there was no or little movement of the client.
In this post, we will cover the wireless heat maps and how they are created in Nectus.
A heat map will allow to visualize the state of the wireless coverage and help to take decision in order to improve the coverage.
Using the information from APs along with a map of physical location, you can find out where are the hot and cold spots.
A heat map is a L2 topology diagram where you can add access points and optionally the controller to which the access points are associated with.
You can add the controller and the APs from the list of controllers:
If the controller and several APs are added to the topology, it will look like this:
In the topology toolbar settings option, you must check the option to see access points in the topology:
Afterwards, the topology looks like this:
You can see which channel is used on each AP and how many clients are connected to each AP.
Nectus goes wireless. Starting from version 1.2.24 we added support for Cisco Wireless.
Powerful dashboards and RSSI heatmaps now available to all Nectus customers. Download your copy of Nectus
One of the key features of Nectus is ability receive SNMP traps. This allows the operator to quickly detect physical (links failures, flaps) or logical (adjacencies failures, flaps) changes in the network followed by restoration procedures or root cause analysis.
Let’s see how does it work on example of this Layer 2 diagram:
The SNMP traps are located in top menu “Logs” -> “SNMP traps and Syslog”.
More exactly here:
Once the devices starts sending SNMP traps, they appears withing 2-3 minutes in Nectus:
At the time of the writing, the new SNMP traps decoding is added manually by the Nectus support team, but in the future the operator will have the ability to add the traps decoding with no external assistance.
All these traps were sent by R1 and R2 when GigabitEthernet0/1 on R1 was shut down. Because OSPF was running between R1 and R2, disabling the interface lead to OSPF adjacency between the two routers to go down.
As you can see, some OIDs are represented their original format, whereas some OIDs are represented in a more human readable format.
The details of a trap might look like this:
With the above trap details, you can tell that this is “link down” trap.
However, with other traps, you might need additional knowledge to figure what they represent.
Let’s take another example of detailed trap:
This trap was sent by R1 and it is a neighbor state change(.1.3.6.1.2.1.14.16.2.2):
And it can be read like this: Router-ID 192.168.0.2(.1.3.6.1.2.1.14.1.1) declared neighbor 192.168.0.3(.1.3.6.1.2.1.14.10.1.3) with IP address on the interface 10.0.0.14(.1.3.6.1.2.1.14.10.1.1) as Down(.1.3.6.1.2.1.14.10.1.6 with value of 1).
Obviously this is not very intuitive and Nectus should do all the the decoding so that the operator will not go through all the effort to find what each OID means.
In the future releases user will have an option to add the decoding for new or unknown SNMP traps via GUI.
Nectus can monitor OpenFlow capable devices in the same way as the non-OpenFlow devices.
In this article we will show how Nectus can discover and monitor switches that are SDN OpenFlow ready.
We will use following sample topology for demonstration with Floodlight OpenFlow controller and three OpenFlow switches: Read more
Under the Tools menu, there are quite a few tools that can help the operator to understand better the network, to perform troubleshooting and to gather information from devices.
These are the options: Read more
This post will cover the SysLog server functionality of Nectus network monitoring software.
As with any modern network monitoring software Nectus has the ability to receive and store the syslog messages from routers, switches or servers.
Syslog messages can be accessed from Top menu “Logs”: Read more
Note: Information is based on Nectus IP geo-location service
| State | City | IPv4 Addresses |
| Ohio | Columbus | 225326103 |
| California | Los Angeles | 54776440 |
| Arizona | Fort Huachuca | 54644594 |
| Texas | Houston | 42689210 |
| District of Columbia | Washington | 32721834 |
| New York | New York City | 31867103 |
| Virginia | Ashburn | 31828300 |
| Indiana | Indianapolis | 26421929 |
| Georgia | Atlanta | 25527566 |
| California | Palo Alto | 25105708 |
| Washington | Redmond | 24885468 |
| Michigan | Dearborn | 23705811 |
| North Carolina | Durham | 21588969 |
| New Jersey | Newark | 21491795 |
| California | San Diego | 21485402 |
| Illinois | Chicago | 20074587 |
| North Carolina | Raleigh | 18955414 |
| New Jersey | Bedminster | 17843408 |
| Texas | Richardson | 17241943 |
| Texas | Dallas | 16869204 |
| Massachusetts | Cambridge | 15868348 |
| California | San Jose | 15336783 |
| Washington | Seattle | 15260827 |
| Alabama | Montgomery | 14906638 |
| California | Cupertino | 13954110 |
| Washington | Bellevue | 13800919 |
| Connecticut | Fairfield | 13507953 |
| California | San Francisco | 12561267 |
| Pennsylvania | Philadelphia | 12464449 |
| Virginia | Reston | 11731922 |
| Florida | Lake Mary | 10572081 |
| New Jersey | Mount Laurel | 10087552 |
| Colorado | Denver | 9869523 |
| Missouri | Saint Louis | 9426794 |
| California | Norwalk | 9273764 |
| Virginia | Virginia Beach | 9107341 |
| Michigan | Ann Arbor | 8772940 |
| California | Mountain View | 8474238 |
| Connecticut | Middletown | 8241397 |
| Texas | San Antonio | 7877211 |
| Texas | Austin | 7734993 |
| Arizona | Phoenix | 7649529 |
| Oregon | Portland | 7600141 |
| New Jersey | Rahway | 7312241 |
| Florida | Miami | 6713810 |
| Ohio | Cincinnati | 6688810 |
| California | Concord | 6607183 |
| Virginia | Dulles | 6470388 |
| Missouri | Town and Country | 5898488 |
| Massachusetts | Boston | 5557232 |
| Louisiana | Monroe | 5300043 |
| Colorado | Greenwood Village | 5070591 |
| Pennsylvania | Pittsburgh | 4780729 |
| Missouri | Kansas City | 4578123 |
| Virginia | Herndon | 4492530 |
| Michigan | Detroit | 4336217 |
| Pennsylvania | Doylestown | 4203957 |
| North Carolina | Charlotte | 4085710 |
| Tennessee | Nashville | 3916537 |
| Georgia | Duluth | 3805720 |
| Nevada | Las Vegas | 3792683 |
| Illinois | Naperville | 3716723 |
| Florida | Orlando | 3665033 |
| California | Sacramento | 3601243 |
| Utah | Salt Lake City | 3592200 |
| Alabama | Redstone Arsenal | 3428226 |
| Minnesota | Minneapolis | 3412363 |
| Florida | Tampa | 3400441 |
| New Jersey | Morristown | 3304100 |
| California | Santa Clara | 3252933 |
| New York | Rochester | 3189712 |
| Maryland | Baltimore | 3079657 |
| Minnesota | Saint Paul | 3019512 |
| Arizona | Kingman | 2983075 |
| Massachusetts | Springfield | 2927039 |
| Wisconsin | Milwaukee | 2811053 |
| Colorado | Fort Collins | 2752782 |
| Wisconsin | Madison | 2732615 |
| California | Belmont | 2725536 |
| Texas | Plano | 2671935 |
| Virginia | Arlington | 2668836 |
| Connecticut | Stamford | 2609471 |
| Ohio | Cleveland | 2600011 |
| Kansas | Overland Park | 2528866 |
| Texas | Irving | 2512563 |
| Kentucky | Richmond | 2509411 |
| Texas | Fort Worth | 2494944 |
| Arkansas | Little Rock | 2446145 |
| Florida | Jacksonville | 2423627 |
| Missouri | Columbia | 2266295 |
| Oregon | Beaverton | 2224613 |
| New York | Buffalo | 2210272 |
| California | San Ramon | 2131203 |
| Ohio | Akron | 2098568 |
| California | Pleasanton | 2097585 |
| Maryland | Rockville | 2072266 |
| California | San Mateo | 2044008 |
| Nebraska | Omaha | 2020147 |
| New York | Albany | 2018827 |
One of the latest features that was added this week is “Routing Table” view in device context menu. Read more
PowerPoint Nectus features presentation as of January 2018
This post will cover how Nectus can dynamically build topologies and how you can check various performance statistics.
Nectus gives the possibility to build automatically L2 and L3 topologies based on the discovered devices.
Additionally, it allows the administrator to create custom topologies by dragging on the map the devices that are required to be on the topology. Read more
CST signs partner agreement with Cisco Learning Academy to provide
Network Visualization and Discovery tools to be used in training classes.
Netflow collector functionality added to Nectus starting from version 1.2.8
