With Dashboard LiveReports, we provide live online reporting to all of our clients. It's now incredibly easy to monitor the health of an entire wireless network without having to log in or learn anything new.

This is a real, live LiveReport for the 71 room, three story Comfort Suites Davis. It includes five sections: Bandwidth usage report, Node list report, Google Maps report, Network diagram and the 24-hour usage report. All data is updated every 5 minutes and may take a few moments to load on this page.

Bandwidth usage report

This report shows the bandwidth usage throughout the day, week and month for the network.

Total bandwidth is measured in kilobits per second of data uploaded and downloaded. If you see the graph topping your modem's speed on a regular basis, we recommend upgrading your Internet service to meet that demand. If you don't upgrade, some members of your network will not be able to connect reliably. We can advise you what Internet service provider and package would work best for you, based on your needs and what is available in your area.

How to read this report: Upload is shown in red and download traffic is shown in blue. Yellow shows the total active users at a particular moment in time.

Node List Report:

This report lists all of the 'nodes'--or wireless repeaters--in your network and shows how each one is doing. Highlights of this report include:

• Outages (last 24 hours): This maps the "gateway metric" for the last 24 hours. "Now" is always on the right side of the graph, and each vertical line in the graph represents 10 minutes and shows the metric that the node had at that time. These are color coded by quality where "green" is good, yellow is marginal and red is poor. Grey indicates that it was not working at all at that time. Ideally, this graph will be all or nearly all green. If you see a lot of variability, it is likely due to a low signal (eg, the node is too far from its neighbors). The Network Diagram Report (see below) can help you and Liveport spot these problem areas.

• Download Speed Last/Average: This column shows your current ("last") and average download speeds to each particular node. To measure the total network speed capabilities, simply add up all of the node speeds.

• Status: The left column is a trouble indicator: Red indicates a node with a serious problem, yellow a node with an intermittent or marginal issue. Grey with a white exclamation mark indicates that it is not working or it is inactive. The four nodes marked "Guest Bridge" are inactive until required by guests who do not have a wireless card.

You can sort the list by clicking on any column.

Google Map report:

Hover your mouse over the different green boxes and you'll see the name of the node, the number of users and the green route it is taking to get to the Gateway mesh node. Click on any green node and you'll see a pop-up that shows all the details for that node. A signal of 17 or more on the "Neighbors" tab in the pop-up box is a healthy connection. Ideally, two or more neighbors will have a signal reading of at least 17 so that you will have built in redundancy if one of them should fail. The mesh node network will reroute wireless traffic to the good one and keep all users online even though one of the nodes failed.

Note: Click the "Satellite" view to see a physical representation of each wireless node.

Network diagram:

The Network Diagram draws node relationships; essentially the connections and connection strength between nodes. Nodes are shown as ellipses (gateways are marked with a (g) after the name). The nodes are color-coded by their gateway connection quality, using the same scale as used for the 24-hour network quality graph above (green, yellow, red). If a node isn't checking in at all, it will be gray. Other features of this page are:

• Extra circles around the ellipses indicate users. For example, a node with 10 users will have 10 circles around it.

• Color coded lines are drawn between the nodes that represent the signal quality between the nodes. Each line should have an arrow at each end which means that both nodes can see each other. Near the arrowhead the actual node to node quality is displayed as a number (0-55) where 55 is perfect. A number of 17 or greater is a healthy connection. Ideally each node will have at least 1 and preferably 2 green lines with a reading of 17 or greater on each end connecting them to each other. A reading of 25 or higher probably indicates that the repeaters are closer than they need to be - you can spread them out a bit more and see how that affects their signal strength readings. This assures that each node has both a strong connection and a backup should something to that link fail.

• Hover the cursor over any node to see the node IP address and the number of hops to the gateway.

24-hour usage and user report

This shows the bandwidth usage for each user throughout the day for the network. Total bandwidth is measured in kilobits per second of data uploaded and downloaded. If you see the graph topping your modem's speed on a regular basis, we recommend upgrading your Internet service to meet that demand. If you don't upgrade, some members of your network will not be able to connect reliably. We can advise you what Internet service provider and package would work best for you, based on your needs and what is available in your area.

Sort the "KB Down" column to show your heaviest users. Using this information, we can determine who bandwidth abusers are (those downloading illegal movies and TV shows) and block them from further use. The Dashboard allows the Network Administrator to block any user temporarily--until he has called the support team to get reconnected--at which point we warn the guest and explain your location's usage policies. Note: an Administrator can see the computer names for each user that we don't display in the public page shown here.