The most useful Prime Infrastructure report

Cisco’s Prime Infrastructure has come a long way over the past couple of years. From it’s beginnings as WCS, then to NCS, then through the sordid Prime Infrastructure 1.x versions, we’ve finally arrived at a place where it’s reasonable to dig back into the product. To say that Prime Infrastructure (PI for short) is an overwhelming product is an understatement. I decided to write about an obscure but extremely useful report (yes, a boring report) that I think you should use.

As we all know, in the RF world, performance revolves around Channel Utilization – of which there are several definitions. For simplicities sake, I’m referring to Channel Utilization as reported by the venerable Cognio card (AKA: CleanAir) – the baseline reference that most Wireless LAN Professionals use to call ‘Channel Utilization’. This is the amount of energy detected on a channel during a specific dwell time. This metric is roughly the wired equivalent of ‘link utilization’. Wouldn’t it be nice to see a historic report of the ‘link utilization’ of all of the APs radios in our environment over a period of time? Wouldn’t it be nice to see if a change we made recently (disabling lower data rates for example) made a historic significance to our Channel Utilization? Yes, of course it would! Without further ado, I bring you, the Channel Utilization report that you always wished you had, but never knew was always at a your fingertips:

Reports Launch Pad -> Wireless Utilization -> Radio

(that last bit is important!)

This gives you a historical report of every radio in your infrastructure (all 2.4 and 5GHz) and a trending of not only their Channel Utilization, but their TX and RX utilization for further correlation/troubleshooting:

What do you think? Do you find this report useful? If so, drop me a comment and let me know how you use it. What other reports do you find yourself favoring in Prime Infrastructure?