Administrative Unit Assessments

NI&S is required to set measurable goals on an annual basis. These are the goals for the wireless service for the year 2021.

Service Objective

Design and build robust and resilient IT infrastructure in support of Virginia Tech's expansion and growth.

Measure: indoor coverage

Track Wi-Fi coverage in indoor programmed spaces.

Target

Provide comprehensive indoor Wi-Fi coverage with at least -65dBm signal strength for all programmed spaces.

Progress

We already design for this. However, measuring it in a meaningful was is tricky. Some options include:

  1. Spot checking areas manually
  2. Deploy end-to-end testing beacons
  3. Count tickets

Each of these have their drawbacks. 1 and 2 are guaranteed to miss areas, especially corner cases that were missed in the design phase. 3 is not practical as it is not possible to programmatically extracting that data from tickets.

Measure: capacity

Track Wi-Fi capacity in indoor programmed spaces.

Target

Track Wi-Fi capacity to ensure a wireless client to access point ratio of 25:1 or better.

Progress

This is another tricky one to measure, mostly because our monitoring tools suck. AirWave and NetInsight are both going away in the next year(ish), and will be replaced with Central On-Prem (COP). We will re-evaluate when COP is deployed.

It is worth noting that clients per radio is perhaps not the best metric:

  • The 2.4GHz space is noisier than 5GHz, and as such would need a lower threshold for an equivalent experience.
  • A client connecting at 12Mbps uses more resources than a client connecting at 900Mbps.
  • A client streaming Netflix 4k uses more resources than an idle client.

Suggestion: let's track peak airtime utilization instead. We need to find what is a good target and how to measure this.

Measure: outdoor coverage

Track Wi-Fi coverage in outdoor spaces.

Target

Expand the number of outdoor wireless access points by 20%.

Progress

Funding for this is planned. We need to determine how many (in scope) outdoor APs exist now.

Administrative Objective

Increase organizational efficiency and responsiveness.

Measure: AP provisioning

Improve AP provisioning capabilities

Target

Automate the provisioning of all standard wireless access point installations.

Progress

This one is mostly done. See enhancement task.

Complete:

  • Work with devs to create a tool that will automatically provision an AP.
  • The tool has 2 modes:
    • REST API: on demand provisioning of an AP by passing a MAC address
    • Nightly reconciler: in case something on demand is missed (or the environment changes).
  • Pulls info from the controller and LLDP to determine the AP group and name.
  • Creates an AP group if none exists.
  • A script is written to parse an SNMP trap and fire off the REST call.
  • MDs currently send traps via IPv4 to OMD (stonefly).

Incomplete:

  • OMD is not correctly processing the traps it receives.
  • Moving from OMD to AKIPS now that it is purchased.
  • Rather than managing the SNMP/REST connector ourselves, we would rather have the web app listen to SNMP directly.
  • Documentation