- [Instructor] In this segment, we're gonna take
a closer look at wireless heat maps
and why they're so important.
Now, to do this, we're gonna use a demo site
that's been stood up by SolarWinds.
So here we are at the SolarWinds demo site.
There's a number of dashboards that you can look at
that reflect what their various products do.
We're gonna go over to the network dashboard
because that's where the wireless networking is shown.
And I'm just gonna scroll down a little bit.
And there are my wireless heat maps,
a heat map of the first floor that's named as good,
the second floor, mediocre, the third floor, poor,
and of headquarters.
Now, you can see it also tells me how many access points
I have, how many clients, and when it was last generated.
So let's take a look at both the first floor that's good,
and then we'll look at the third floor that's poor.
And as you're looking at this, think about how easy it is
to recognize, you know, the service that you're providing,
that the access points are providing, you know,
areas that could be improved,
areas that need to be remediated, you know,
how you're providing the appropriate level of coverage,
you know, to both users and to conference rooms.
And then imagine if you didn't do this visually,
what it would look like if it was perhaps
in a spreadsheet or database,
how you wouldn't be able to have that immediate response,
that immediate understanding of how you should respond,
what you need to do.
So let's first look at the first floor that's good.
It's gonna look for those access points.
We had five access points there, and here we go.
We have the overlay over the floor plan.
Each of these icons represent an active wireless client
at the time that the map was drawn.
Little green dots are going to be my access points
and telling me if my access points were up.
So I get this quick view of where are the clients
and where are the access points.
But more importantly,
I get a view of the wireless signal strength,
starting with kind of the reddish
telling me that's really good.
Going into orange, going to yellow, light blue, blue, white,
kind of degradating, that wireless signal strength
is degradating as I go down that color chart.
So again, I look at this
and I don't have any white or blue or light blue.
That's pretty awesome.
I can see that I've got some really strong orange,
you know, or the dark orange or red, you know,
getting into the lighter orange and into yellow, you know.
But then I can also notice that even though this is good,
I've got some conference rooms over here
on the left hand side that may have a number
of people who wanna be using wireless and it's good,
but perhaps it could be better.
Maybe I just need to pop an access point somewhere
over here where the conference rooms are.
Again, I can see where the usage is and how we're doing.
That's awesome.
Let's do a comparison now to a floor that has poor coverage.
So I'm just coming back to my dashboard.
We're gonna choose third floor, poor.
So only three access points on that floor.
And wow, what a difference, right?
The white is telling me that we've got really poor coverage
and, yeah, I've got users in those areas.
The blue and the light blue, not so good, right?
Areas of yellow and orange,
and then the darker orange or red.
I only have three wireless access points.
I can see exactly where they are, you know,
and I can see whole areas that's missing coverage
even though I have users that are there.
So right away I get a sense
of where I'm missing an access point,
where maybe I wanna move an access point,
or maybe I'm surprised that, you know,
that the signal is actually pretty weak
even around some of the access points,
and maybe that's indicative of a problem
with the access point itself.
So I can't stress enough the importance of heat maps, right?
You quickly look at this map
and you understand what the problems are,
you recognize the problems, and you get that quick sense
of what you need to do to remediate or to improve.
You know, one of the nice things
about in the SolarWinds site is
that you can actually download their programs
for I believe it's a 30-day eval, a free trial,
and just start building your own and see what it looks like
and get a sense for how important heat maps are.
Now, whether they're SolarWinds or any other vendor,
I'm not pushing a particular vendor,
but I think trying this out in your environment,
really important, and I guarantee once you've got heat maps
going in your wireless environment,
you will never be able to live without them.
And that, my friends,
is a closer look at wireless heat maps.