Wi-Fi Network Monitor

Every day your network, regardless of its size, relies on Wi-Fi to ensure wireless, remote, and mobile devices remain connected to one another and to internet access points. With so many devices accessing the internet and participating in networks at any given time, reliable network uptime is no longer a guarantee.

This is where Wi-Fi monitoring devices come into play. A Wi-Fi network monitor is a form of software used to collect, consolidate, and display information about the access points and channels on your network via one, easy-to-access dashboard. Most Wi-Fi monitoring tools allow you to choose a wireless spectrum to evaluate, like 2.4GHz or 5GHz. Once you’ve selected your wireless spectrum, the platform will gather and display information pertaining to the health of your networks, their channels, and overall signal strength.

These platforms track key performance metrics and provide in-depth, critical device details, including current node status, device information, average response time, packet loss, and more at a glance—so you can keep your finger on the pulse of Wi-Fi connectivity. While Wi-Fi monitors can vary in their approach, it’s important to find a tool designed to synthesize data effectively. This means turning to tools leveraging network visualization or a logical data prioritization hierarchy to help you understand how data points relate and where network issues may be forming.

Comprehensive Wi-Fi performance monitoring devices also provide color-coded heatmaps to leverage device data and display signal strength. These maps provide real-time insights into your wireless network and further facilitate troubleshooting when users come calling with connectivity complaints. Using the heatmap to identify where network downtime is occurring, you can then drill down and examine the routers, access points, and connected clients to glean more insights into what’s causing the connectivity issue and how it can be remedied.

Delayed response times, dropped Wi-Fi signals, and overall weak and unreliable Wi-Fi is typically rooted in connection speed, signal strength, capacity, and network security. Wi-Fi performance monitoring tools gather and display robust insights into each of these categories, so you can get to the root of poor performance before “business as usual” comes to a grinding halt. Here are the four most common issues Wi-Fi monitoring tools will help you detect, diagnose, and resolve:

Poor connection speed – Slow internet and/or inter-device connections are often the result of noise, which can be anything interfering with the Wi-Fi client’s waveform and preventing it from carrying a signal. Noise comes in many shapes and sizes. Microwaves, power strips, and Bluetooth devices all emit waves which can impede with your Wi-Fi. When noise interferes with your Wi-Fi connection, transmission rates lag considerably.

Weak signal strength – A weak signal strength will prevent applications, web browsers, and network servers from performing at their highest possible level. Noise plays a major part in the quality of your signal as do the buildings and materials surrounding your router. So, while radio waves can travel through drywall, wood, and glass, they struggle to penetrate metal, concrete, and stone.

Mismanaged network capacity – A successful IT infrastructure must take network bandwidth into consideration. Your network bandwidth is determined by the number of devices and the amount of traffic your Wi-Fi network can handle. While most networks can support around 250 devices, linking all of these devices to one network, at one time, will drastically reduce your connection speed. Access points are a great way to help manage your bandwidth and regain a steady, speedy connection.

Compromised network security – A compromised Wi-Fi connection serves as an invitation for cyber attackers, putting sensitive data in jeopardy. It also results in a shaky internet connection plagued by excessive lag times, as hackers greedily consume network bandwidth. A Wi-Fi monitor will help you ensure a safe and secure connection.

Wi-Fi monitoring can help IT admins navigate the complicated, evolving networking landscape of today’s digital era. Your Wi-Fi networks aren’t static, but instead teeming with activity. Network applications, wireless devices, and even the physical landscape all leave their mark on the network. That means simply having a wireless network isn’t enough to keep your company, however large or small, up and running smoothly. IT administrators must conduct Wi-Fi monitoring to achieve the following objectives.

Improve performance and boost productivity – Wi-Fi connectivity is constantly in flux. Unfortunately, extreme lag times or even complete network downtime are more common than not as a result of changes in device configuration, server hardware failure, and discards in network devices. When a user complains their work has come to a standstill as a result of poor connectivity, it’s up to the IT administrator to get to the root of the problem. A robust Wi-Fi monitoring platform will help administrators examine critical network paths, identifying whether the problem lies within a specific application, device, or network. Once they’ve isolated where the problem resides, they can jump in to solve it and bring their company’s employees back online in a timely manner.

Increase security – Many security attacks exist to compromise the network. For example, in a denial of service (DoS) attack, a cyber attacker will attempt to render a machine or network application or device utterly ineffective by disrupting the internet connection. This is often accomplished when the attacker bombards the system with an inordinate amount of fake service requests, overwhelming the system and preventing legitimate requests from being fulfilled. Wi-Fi network monitoring helps IT administrators keep their finger on the pulse of their networks, alerting them when rogue devices access the wireless network and flagging suspicious activity.

If you want to understand how to monitor Wi-Fi with SolarWinds NPM, it all boils down to a comprehensive algorithm. The platform’s wireless heat maps use an algorithm to determine signal coverage, which is then displayed to the user via an easy-to-read dashboard. Dark red on the heat map indicate areas where the Wi-Fi signal is strong, while cooler, bluer colors indicate weaker signal strengths.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor also relies on hop-by-hop analysis along critical pathways to help IT administrators keep their finger on the pulse of their network. This system provides IT administrators with detailed visibility into nodes on-premise, in the cloud, and/or across hybrid environments. Visibility at this level is essential when it comes to viewing device and application performance, traffic, and configuration details allowing administrators to troubleshoot availability issues.

Along those same lines, Network Performance Monitor leverages cross-stack network data correlation to accelerate the identification of root cause through a drag-and-drop feature. By simply aligning network performance metrics along a common timeline, IT administrators gain immediate visual correlation across all network data.

This data is consolidated and stored within the platform’s custom, easy-to-access dashboard. Through the dashboard’s digital filter, IT technicians can quickly find the details they need, saving hours spent manually sifting through troves of metrics.

SolarWinds Wi-Fi monitoring software further streamlines the process by automatically discovering wireless access points and controllers as wireless devices. This allows the software to better categorize the wireless devices currently available in your network. You can then monitor and manage these wireless devices alongside your wired devices via comprehensive system of alerts, reports, and top 10 lists of your infrastructure.

IT administrators who want to know how to monitor Wi-Fi effectively should look no further than SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor. This powerful and affordable network monitoring software empowers IT technicians to detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance problems and outages—quickly and efficiently.

Network Performance Monitor provides in-depth insight into the network, identifying the root source of a network issue to allow for faster resolution times. The platform makes it easier to automatically discover wireless access points and controllers, construct wireless heat maps, and report on a host of details, including IP address and device type. IT technicians can even periodically poll thin and autonomous wireless access points, controllers, and connected devices. Access to this level of information means IT administrators aren’t left in the dark when it comes to the health and status of their network environment.

To further increase efficiencies and boost the security of any company’s network, SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor provides topology and dependency-aware intelligent network monitoring alerts. These alerts are displayed via a customizable, web-based dashboard administrators can access anywhere, at any time. The dashboard empowers IT technicians to drill down into the wireless node in critical status and view a vast array of device details, including packet loss, average response time, and current node status.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is a flexible and multi-vendor network monitoring software, meaning it’s built to scale with the needs of your network. Start small and expand the platform as needed to ensure you’re gleaning all the network insights required to maintain a high-performing, secure network.