My 3 favorite features of the netAlly EtherScope nXG

how many tools and devices are you carrying in your bag when you go to do a wi-fi assessment or to troubleshoot wi-fi i've been looking at minimizing and limiting how many devices i carry because it's starting to fill up my bag pretty bit a bit and so what i started looking at is this net ally etherscope nxg which is a handheld wi-fi tool which can do a lot of different things and consolidate the number of devices that i'm carrying so after using this for a couple of months i wanted to share some of my favorite features of the etherscope nxg so what i'm going to do is share my screen and take a look at the ether scope here my first feature that i want to share is the auto test now the auto test is a great way to just tap on start and run a test to gather a lot of different things this is the screen that you see here where i have a demo profile group that is going to run two other profiles to to collect data you can configure your own [Music] profile groups if you want you can have multiple which is useful if you're going into different environments and maybe you go into those environments regularly so there's a specific test that you want to run so here i'm configuring this demo profile group where you can set this periodically to run a test so over time if you need this running for maybe an hour you can set an interval of about maybe a test run this test every five minutes for a duration of an hour for example so you set that there in the environment and then it'll periodically run that test for you which is good to collect data over time and to analyze it but what i want to do is not enable that for now but i i have different profiles here to run tests so my first profile is a wi-fi profile where i'm connecting to a specific ssid and there's different tests that are being ran here so when you're connecting to an ssid the ether scope will connect to the best signal of that ssid if you want it to be very specific you could tell it to connect to a specific bssid and test against that one you could even tell it don't test 2.4 maybe you just want to test 5 gigahertz so you can't select that here otherwise it's just auto and then there are different link thresholds that you can set as per your requirements where whether that's a signal threshold snr and also retries right so so these are the tests it's going to run against that ssid that you have configured now in addition to just connecting to that ssid i can run channel tests which it is already doing as part of the connecting to the ssid but maybe i want to look at the channel specifically that it's connecting to versus just the ssid so you can enable disable these set your your thresholds per your requirements and then you can go back and look at what kind of test it's going to run here so there's a dns test which i have specified what i wanted to do a dns lookup for and it'll tell me how long it took to run that that dns lookup it'll do a gateway test make sure it has connectivity to the gateway and i have two additional target tests that i have set up where i'm gonna pull the http website for google.com and tell me how long it took to do that as well as just some ping tests for ip addresses so i've got that configured for that ssid now let's say you want to go into an environment and test more than one ssid that's very possible you just tap on this plus icon down here below and then click or tap on add wi-fi profile so now you can test against multiple ssids that way you're not having to do that manually so i'm going to delete that for now because i don't have it set up my second test that i'm running here is an air quality profile test so here again we're going to look at the channel itself 802.11 utilization non-80211 utilization as well as co-channel interference so you can specify your requirements there if there's a certain number of aps you you want to be warned about on code channel you can set that and also set the failure rate along with the the signal that it should hear it at so as you can see in this in this profile group it's going to run these two tests sequentially so it'll run the demo one first and then the air quality profile second so now i can save this and do a save as and you can see i have three other profiles i'm using in order to have different tests so you can go ahead and click save i guess that's so i can just save to the same name and it'll overwrite that so now we go back here and tap on start and it's going to run those tests and it'll run it against the wi-fi adapter that it has for testing there is a separate wi-fi adapter just for management on the etherscope nxg so let's wait for these tests to run and then we'll come back it took less than two minutes to run both of these tests so here we can see there are some warnings and failure thresholds that have been met so once you do this this test you can go in and start looking at them and and see where those failures were okay so i uh it took too long to run this http test for example or uh ping wasn't that great so you can start diving into that and analyzing why that is especially looking at air quality profile maybe there was something there i had co-channel interference a lot of different things you could use to analyze the wi-fi network you can see i connected on channel 36 but channel utilization wasn't was was pretty good so a lot of different things right so that's auto test you can dive into that save your results to link live my second favorite feature is going to be rf and traffic statistics so here i'm going to tap on wi-fi and just so you know you could get to rf and and traffic statistics through the auto test function as well when you're diving into a channel so what i'm looking at here is the channels map the ether scope's going to scan through every single channel on 2.4 and five gigahertz and give you a report of how many uh clients it sees how many aps what the utilization is whether there's non-802 eleven utilization that was uh that was seen but what i like to do is look at the ssids specifically for what i'm troubleshooting so here i'm gonna tap on frame thrower and i can see all right there's three aps seen we've got bssids there's six of them we're on two channels there's clients so we can dive into this a little bit further if we go into channels and say i want to look at channel one so now i'm looking specifically at channel one in which my one of my aps is operating on and down at the bottom i have rf and traffic statistics and so it's starting to gather this information over time and so that's what these little those graphs are you have the signal strength at the top that's the first graph you see and i can drag this bar here to zoom in and look at that time stamp there that is showing or i can zoom out and see overall what it's doing what's really great about the statistics i get here is i can see what my current signal strength is the uh the minimum uh and the max and also the average so we have a couple of different pieces of data here that we could use in order to troubleshoot and you get your snr as well right so that's a value that you want to look at carefully with your signal strength and then going down here looking at all right let me let me see what my channel utilization here is so on average it's about 13 and on average i'm getting about four percent of some sort of interference here and so when you look at this data and try to correlate that with whatever devices you are troubleshooting or maybe it's an application you're troubleshooting you want to see whether or not rf is going to be an issue if that's what's preventing something from working the way we expect right and then retries is another look at the quality of the wi-fi network and so i will look at average retry rate over a specified amount of time to see if we maybe that's what's causing the wi-fi network to be slow and so we look at that and there's not much going on as far as retry rate right less than one percent on average while i'm capturing right now so i like to spend my time here when i'm troubleshooting uh maybe a specific area i go into the channel where the clients are connecting and start looking at this this little wrench icon here you could then capture frames over wi-fi so maybe you wanted to analyze this a little bit further get that data uh maybe you do see a lot of retries for whatever reason you could then go to capture wi-fi and start capturing frames so i won't go into this too much but that possibility is there so going back you could then look at the other channels as well maybe channel one wasn't what you're looking at channel 636 and start going into you can see there's a lot more channel utilization happening as it's starting to gather that data and what about the retry rate so retry rates are looking a little bit higher so you want to look into why that is and use the ether scope to maybe help you come to that conclusion so the third feature that i want to share with you is the air mapper feature air mapper is relatively new to net ally and it's a way to perform validation surveys so i'm going to tap on air mapper and right away you see i have a floor plan already already loaded here you could load a floor plan there's an sd card that is on the ether scope right here you could transfer that to from your laptop onto the sd card and then from there you could load that into here where you go to floor plan and at a level you could you could add a floor plan here which will allow you to add a floor plan so what i did is i tapped on settings in air mapper this is the main screen it'll bring you into so i'll tap on the settings the gear at the top right i can give my validation survey a name you can add a description and then add all the floor plans so here i've got a four level pick mod and what i want to do for each floor plan is set the dimensions so you have uh as accurate as possible when it comes to doing this validation survey and so you'll use these little markers here to say uh what the distance is and i've i measured this section this this section here of the pick mod as 90.2 feet all right so do that for each level so right now i'm currently at going to be doing a validation survey for level one and the signal propagation that i wanna um use is ten feet and uh ten feet uh i i selected ten feet because i measured a piece of the pick mod where i know every 10 feet that's where i'm going to tap on the screen to collect my measurements so in this current i'm using current scanning mode here not scan once i'm not going to overwrite any bands or channels so with this handheld tool it's going to be simple to just even allow somebody else to do this survey for you and all they got to do is say zoom in here i'm going to start here at the near the middle i'm going to tap on start and i know that here is where i am so you saw that it turned red for a moment there that's doing its scan and i know right about here is 10 feet which is right on the edge of that circle and about every 10 feet i'm going to tap so i'm going to walk the distance of 10 feet then i'm going to tap where i am on the floor plan which is roughly about 10 feet and this is great because once you're done i i tapped on stop you could share this by using that share icon on the top right and upload it to link live so with link link live i could then share this with other people or look at the results on link live that's where i'm gonna look at it so i'm gonna share this with francois and save it to my air mapper files and so air mapper i think that's going to be a great tool for using your your single device again for troubleshooting and then now for validating the the network you just upload your floor plan right now looks like it's just a stop and go type of survey where i'm going to walk to a destination stop tap on the screen wait for it to gather its results and once it turns green a circle that circles green then i'm going to walk to the next location and then tap again the disadvantage i see there is if you've got a large floor plan like the one that i've i've got here there's four levels of this it's going to take a long time to do that survey so hopefully netaly adds a function where you can do a continuous survey as it as you walk it will continually gather those results for you and you just tap on each turn that you make because otherwise i think it's it's a great application for smaller environments it's not going to be um you know you're not going to be carrying a lot of usb dongles or a laptop or maybe an ipad with another dongle connected to it you could send this etherscope and xg out to somebody else to to run these tests for you and they could upload it to link live so that those are the three features that my favorite features right now of the etherscope nxg it was uh air mapper which i just showed you the rf and traffic statistics taking a look at the ch the channel individually and how rf is doing for further troubleshooting and then also the auto test the auto test feature allows me to collect a lot of different data very quickly without having to go and tap into different screens of the ether scope so hopefully that gives you some familial familiarity of the etherscope nxg if you have any questions about it or comments or or maybe there's a tip you want to provide please let me know down in the comments below but i want to thank you for watching this video

Channel: Rowell Dionicio

Views: 489

Keywords: wifi, netally, etherscope nxg, network tools

Id: J7aW4tOk_kM

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020