Setup Guide Part 1

2 7signal solution 4
7signal Solutions, Inc., 526 S. Main Street, Akron, Ohio 44311, USA, 855-763-9526, [e-mail], www.7signal.com
7signal Sapphire Carat User Guide Release 5.0
In Sapphire, the management tool Carat and monitoring station Eye work as a client and
server, with Eye being the server for Carat. The traffic between the client and server is strongly
encrypted and uses 7signal’s proprietary management protocol. This makes it possible to
manage the monitoring stations from geographically distant locations and over insecure
networks.
A monitoring station conducts both passive and active measurements in a WLAN environment.
The passive measurements consist of listening to data traffic that uses the IEEE 802.11
protocol and of general analysis of the radio frequency spectrum in the coverage area. Passive
measurements have no effect on the functionality or utilization rate of the target network, or
the effect is very small (probe request transmissions). During active measurements, Sapphire
Eye contacts each monitored access point in turn and uses the network services via the WLAN;
i.e., it acts as a client in the network. Using both active and passive measurements, the 7signal
solution can monitor the experienced network performance along the entire length of the
service chain and locate problems in both WLAN and LAN environments.
The monitoring station is also able to execute active measurements over its Ethernet interface.
Results of Ethernet tests can be distinguished from WLAN test results by applying Ethernet
specific Area Aggregations in Sapphire Analyzer tool.
2.2 Soft Eye
The monitoring station software can be installed to a laptop PC running Linux distributions
supported by 7signal. The laptop must be equipped with a suitable WLAN card. Supported
WLAN cards are listed in the Release Notes document. Soft Eye supports smaller set of
measurements than Sapphire Eye.
2.3 Micro Eye
Micro Eye is a Raspberry PI (rev B) computer board, equipped with suitable WLAN network
interface card (supported WLAN cards are listed in Release Notes document). Micro Eye is
shipped with pre-installed SDHC memory card, which contains operating system and Sapphire
Eye software.
Micro Eye supports smaller set of measurements than Sapphire Eye, and it is not suitable for
measuring e.g. maximum throughputs.