Monitoring, Maintenance, and Operations
Operational visibility
Know the monitoring surfaces: controller dashboards, AirWave/centralized management, syslog, SNMP traps, and RF health metrics. Understand firmware upgrade procedures, backup/restore, and configuration versioning. Candidates should know how to schedule maintenance and validate post-change health.
Maintenance concepts
Review license management, certificate renewal, and log retention. Understand how to stage firmware, validate in a lab or pilot group, and roll back. Know the role of NTP and time zones in log correlation and certificate validity.
Traps
Questions often assume monitoring equals alerting - dashboards require thresholds and trap destinations. Another trap: upgrading all controllers simultaneously, which risks outage; staged upgrades with HA awareness are preferred. Watch for expired certificates and NTP drift causing authentication or logging failures.
Rule of thumb
Before any upgrade: back up config, verify HA state, confirm firmware compatibility, and schedule a rollback window. After: validate AP registration, client auth, and RF health.
Metrics to track
AP uptime, client counts, channel utilization, retry rates, and authentication failures.