First Impressions 🔎: Wyebot Wireless Intelligence Platform

A few weeks ago, I noticed a new member in the Meraki Marketplace, Wyebot. This monitoring solution acts as an overlay to any vendor's WLAN solution to troubleshoot issues and proactively identify issues.

Lo and behold, I was offered one of the WIS4300s to test by their team (Thank you!). The unit fits onto a grid ceiling like an AP with internal antennas. You can also freely move the unit around for troubleshooting as needed.

Having experience with multiple wireless monitoring solutions, both overlay and integrated, Wyebot caught my interest as it offers a lower cost alternative. We all know sending people onsite to troubleshoot is 💸expensive💸, but integrated monitoring solutions pose an upfront financial investment. Once I received the WIS4300, the setup was simple. All I had to do was wait for the firmware download after it received an IP.

The home page has widgets for monitoring network speed, channel utilization and application specific performance.

Above the widgets, you can view alerts for your network. This is an example warning that management overhead is too high. Although, I clicked through the warning and this was from my neighbor's AP. I may have missed a step to specifically exclude this AP.

One caveat I ran into while testing on my APs is that you need to be mindful of what channel the Wyebot unit is configured on. The WIS4300 was set to automatic channels. My other AP that I thought I captured data for was on a different channel than the unit. You should double check the channel you need if you are moving the unit frequently for troubleshooting. Unless you have multiple units, it will be difficult to troubleshoot issues occurring on multiple channels.

Here's what I am looking forward to trying with the unit:

-Simulating security attacks and seeing if they are detected

-Trying the packet capture feature

-Seeing if it helps troubleshooting for splash page SSIDs

Overall, I enjoyed the simplicity and the warnings specific to Wi-Fi configuration best practices. The most valuable asset is that Wyebot provides a "sanity check" for RF issues outside of a vendor solution. However, it seems less targeted to those with extensive wireless troubleshooting experience and other tools at their disposal.

I hear 6 GHz support is in the works, but as of today you can monitor 2.4 and 5 GHz with Wyebot. I only used this in my home lab so I would like to see how Wyebot detects issues in larger, busier WLANs.

That's all from me this week. Feel free to share your own experiences with overlay wireless monitoring solutions below!