Unifi Network Troubleshooting

This article describes the processes involved in troubleshooting a Unifi network. This assumes that the store has adequately followed the instructions for network setup in the VLAN setup document:

The link above is the Site Manager of the Cents Unifi account. Here, all store networks are shown. Search for store/fleet at hand. If I were navigating to the "Clean Hamper" store's network, I would click this icon here.

Upon clicking that icon, you are brought into the site manager for that Unifi network - either virtually via VLAN or physically with the UDM/UDR device in the store. You will see network stats here.

The red box shows the network health over the past 24h. Here a network outage will be made clear. If a customer says that they experienced odd behavior, and you see a network outage, that is a sufficient explanation. Outages can be caused by ISP-level problems (inclement weather, planned outages, maintenance etc.), or simply by the network hardware being unplugged. Unplugged hardware is extremely common. This is what a network outage would look like:

Going back to the site homepage, the orange arrow shows the number of clients online. Based on the Master Hardware Intake Form for that store, you can see how many clients you expect to be online and cross-reference this number. For a more in-depth look at the connected clients, navigate to the clients page shown by the purple arrow. Here you can see each client with some data about its connection. How strong is the connection? How long has the device been online? Is it online at all? Devices that recently fell offline will be shown here. When a specific device is problematic, use the MAC address to identify it here and take a closer look.

From the homepage you can also see how many Access Points are online and broadcasting by clicking the button shown by the green arrow. This page will show if one or more Access Points are not powered on, which can be helpful for debugging.

It may be the case that a WiFi network is not properly configured. The yellow area shows the settings button.

Clicking on the WiFi network name, ensure that it is as shown in the screenshots.

Click "Apply Changes" if any changes have been made.

Using the steps shown above, valuable information can be obtained towards debugging or fixing issues experienced by stores.

One common issue that can occur is related to DHCP, which is the process by which IP addresses are assigned to the Penny/Pulse devices. This issue is commonly seen when many devices are shown as offline in the Business Manager, but show as online in the Unifi dashboard. This is also seen when the "Experience" shown in the Unifi dashboard is far less than 95%. See what this looks like here:

Going into the "Clients" section, you will see device IP addresses that start with 168.xxxx instead of 192. Sometimes you may see multiple devices sharing the same IP. This isn't possible, so if that is the case then there is definitely a DHCP issue.

Identifying this issue quickly is very helpful because ultimately this is a customer-caused issue and can only be resolved by them understanding their network situation and removing the problem router or changing their setup. Ask them specifically what network hardware they have plugged in (routers, switches, backups, etc.). Ask them if anything has changed recently to cause this issue (sometimes this can present itself days/weeks after install with everything else working normally). Besides rebooting network hardware, they should identify the router that is most likely creating a secondary DHCP server and making it so that our devices cannot have an IP assigned to them.

As always, rebooting network hardware is a good idea and should be done to the ISP modem/router as well as the APs by removing power from the PoE injectors/switch momentarily.