Access Points

Plugin: charts.d.plugin Module: ap

Overview

The ap collector visualizes data related to wireless access points.

It uses the iw command line utility to detect access points. For each interface that is of type AP, it then runs iw INTERFACE station dump and collects statistics.

This collector is only supported on the following platforms:

Linux

This collector only supports collecting metrics from a single instance of this integration.

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

The plugin is able to auto-detect if you are running access points on your linux box.

Limits

The default configuration for this integration does not impose any limits on data collection.

Performance Impact

The default configuration for this integration is not expected to impose a significant performance impact on the system.

Metrics

Metrics grouped by scope.

The scope defines the instance that the metric belongs to. An instance is uniquely identified by a set of labels.

Per wireless device

These metrics refer to the entire monitored application.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
ap.clients	clients	clients
ap.net	received, sent	kilobits/s
ap.packets	received, sent	packets/s
ap.issues	retries, failures	issues/s
ap.signal	average signal	dBm
ap.bitrate	receive, transmit, expected	Mbps

Alerts

There are no alerts configured by default for this integration.

Setup

Prerequisites

Install charts.d plugin

If using our official native DEB/RPM packages, make sure netdata-plugin-chartsd is installed.

`iw` utility.

Make sure the iw utility is installed.

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is charts.d/ap.conf.

You can edit the configuration file using the edit-config script from the Netdata config directory.

cd /etc/netdata 2>/dev/null || cd /opt/netdata/etc/netdata
sudo ./edit-config charts.d/ap.conf

Options

The config file is sourced by the charts.d plugin. It's a standard bash file.

The following collapsed table contains all the options that can be configured for the ap collector.

Config options

| Name | Description | Default | Required | |:----|:-----------|:-------|:--------:| | ap_update_every | The data collection frequency. If unset, will inherit the netdata update frequency. | 1 | no | | ap_priority | Controls the order of charts at the netdata dashboard. | 6900 | no | | ap_retries | The number of retries to do in case of failure before disabling the collector. | 10 | no |

Examples

Change the collection frequency

Specify a custom collection frequence (update_every) for this collector

# the data collection frequency
# if unset, will inherit the netdata update frequency
ap_update_every=10

# the charts priority on the dashboard
#ap_priority=6900

# the number of retries to do in case of failure
# before disabling the module
#ap_retries=10

Troubleshooting

Debug Mode

To troubleshoot issues with the ap collector, run the charts.d.plugin with the debug option enabled. The output should give you clues as to why the collector isn't working.

Navigate to the plugins.d directory, usually at /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/. If that's not the case on your system, open netdata.conf and look for the plugins setting under [directories].
```
cd /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/
```
Switch to the netdata user.
```
sudo -u netdata -s
```
Run the charts.d.plugin to debug the collector:
```
./charts.d.plugin debug 1 ap
```

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