IAPViewer Documentation

Version: 2.0 (build 0.6.0) · Last updated: May 31, 2026

This page is the screen-by-screen user guide. For installation, contact, and FAQ-style troubleshooting see the Support page.

About this app: IAPViewer is a read-only monitoring tool for Aruba IAP clusters. It inspects what your Virtual Controller is doing — channels, clients, signal health, RF neighbours, spectrum — and never writes configuration back to the controller. Anything that would change the cluster's state is offered as copy-and-paste CLI text, not an API call.

What's new in 2.0

Version 2.0 is the largest release since the original ship. Headlines below — most are described in detail later on this page.

Latest additions (build 0.6.0)

Navigation rebuilt around the platform

Channel View (Channels tab)

Channel Detail upgraded

Per-client diagnostics

Faster, smoother loads

Resilience and diagnostics

Settings and presentation

Getting connected

Sites

IAPViewer organises every cluster you connect to as a site. The site stores the Virtual Controller address, the optional fallback address, the username, and per-site preferences (font size, RSSI cutoff, client history retention, API call gap, fallback prompt state). Passwords are held in the iOS Keychain, not in the site record.

From the login screen:

Test API

The site editor includes a Test API button that runs a pre-login REST probe against the configured VC and, if present, the fallback. The probe runs POST /rest/login, GET /rest/show-cmd?cmd=show version (with and without type=2), and POST /rest/logout, then displays each step with the raw request and response.

Leaving IAPViewer to send that email (or open the support site) no longer logs you out — see Keep session on switch under Settings.

Fallback VC IP

Each site can carry an optional secondary VC address. When the primary fails to bootstrap because of a network or VC-refusal error, IAPViewer silently logs in against the fallback and shows a notice once you're connected. Details:

Login errors

Every connection failure now produces a cause-specific dialog rather than the old generic "Firmware Version Error":

Login-screen errors are translated into plain English ("Username or password is wrong", "Couldn't reach the VC in time. Check your network and the address, then try again.") rather than HTTP codes.

Navigation

The navigation surface adapts to the device:

iPad & Apple Silicon Mac ("Designed for iPad")

A persistent sidebar runs down the left, organised into four sections:

RF Locator appears under Monitor when enabled via Settings → Experimental → Show RF Location. In portrait orientation the sidebar is hidden by default and swipes out from the left edge.

iPhone Pro / Max in landscape

Same sidebar; hidden by default and swipes out from the left edge.

iPhone in portrait

A native tab bar runs along the bottom with five tabs:

Loading indicators

A thin progress strip runs along the top of the screen during loads. Each stage has its own colour and fills in turn; a light haptic pulses once per completed call, in step with the bar. The two core stages always run; the rest only run when their toggle is enabled in Settings.

  1. Core — light blue. Cluster summary, firmware, clients, associations, and per-AP details. When this finishes the app is fully usable.
  2. Detail — mid blue. Channel quality, per-AP statistics, RF neighbours, performance metrics, wired-port data, and ancillary info.
  3. Spectrum — amber. Per-AP spectrum scans for Channel View and Channel Detail. Optional (Load Spectrum Data, on by default).
  4. BLE — blue. Per-AP Bluetooth discovery. Optional (Load BLE Data, off by default).
  5. UCC — green. Voice/Video (Wi-Fi calling, meeting apps). Optional (Load UCC Data, off by default), and a quick final pass.

The optional-stage colours are mirrored as a small dot next to each toggle in Settings, so the colour on the bar tells you which feature is loading. You can navigate freely while loading — views populate as their data arrives.

Clients & APs (hierarchical tree)

The primary monitoring surface. The cluster is shown as a tree:

Site
  ├── AP
  │     ├── Radio (band, channel, width)
  │     │     ├── Client
  │     │     └── Client
  │     └── Wired Interface
  │           └── LLDP Neighbour
  ├── AP …
  └── Offline AP (italicised + dimmed)

What it shows

What you can do

On iPad detail screens open as a slide-in panel from the trailing edge over a dimmed background; on iPhone they appear as sheets. The tree underneath stays interactive on iPad.

Performance flagging

The same warning triangle used in the Performance view appears inline on client rows that meet your configured retry threshold or signal/SNR limits. Tapping into Client Detail from a flagged client shows the same Performance Impact card as the Performance tab.

Wired topology overlay

If Settings → Topology → Load Wired Port & LLDP Data is on (default), per-AP port speed/duplex and a single cluster-wide LLDP fetch are pre-fetched in the background after the critical-path load. The information is then available wherever a wired port or LLDP neighbour appears.

Channels (Channel View)

A WiFi-Explorer-style cluster spectrum view. The screen is reached from the Channels tab on iPhone, or Monitor → Channels in the sidebar on iPad.

The chart

One band at a time (2.4 / 5 / 6 GHz, selected from the segmented band picker). Each AP radio in the cluster is drawn as a bar:

When spectrum data is enabled, foreign and rogue SSIDs detected by your APs are overlaid as translucent ghost bars on a separate RSSI scale shown on the right.

What you can do

The rogue filter chip uses a red dot so the cue does not depend on colour alone. When spectrum data is disabled in Settings, the foreign filters degrade to "all" so the chart never silently empties.

Channel Detail

Opens from Channel View (tap a bar) or from Channel Quality (tap a row). Shows the full picture for one channel.

Sections, in order

  1. Bonded sub-channels (only on bonded channels > 20 MHz) — one chip per 20 MHz block in the bond, tinted by per-block quality and marked "P" for the primary. Tap a chip to inspect that sub-channel's readings.
  2. Channel Health — gauge ring with Quality score, stacked Utilization bar (WiFi vs Interference), Noise Floor, SNIR, Retry Rate. Each bar has a doc-icon button for an explainer sheet.
  3. APs on This Channel — each AP's model, scanning state, client count, utilisation, and quality. The AP you tapped (if any) is highlighted with a SELECTED tag. A warning triangle appears on APs reporting non-WiFi interference.
  4. Interfering SSIDs on this channel — foreign networks observed on this channel with manufacturer, PHY, width, AP type, RSSI.
  5. Non-WiFi Interferers — Bluetooth / Microwave / Cordless Phone / Other breakdown, plus active interferers and the channel's spectrum-alert history.
  6. Suggestions — contextual advice based on the readings (non-standard 2.4 GHz channel, DFS, high co-channel AP count, etc.).

Notes

Foreign SSID Detail

Opens from Channel View (tap a ghost bar). Scoped to the specific BSSID you tapped, not aggregated across all radios.

What it shows

Why "inferred": some foreign vendors broadcast with locally-administered (randomised) MAC addresses, which on their own give you "Randomized MAC" instead of a vendor name. IAPViewer walks the same radio's sibling BSSIDs to find one with a burned-in MAC — that one reveals the actual vendor, and the inference is attributed back to the BSSID you tapped.

RF Neighbors

The cluster's complete view of every other Wi-Fi network its radios can hear — your own SSIDs, foreign networks, and any APs classified as rogue.

Organised as a tree: SSID → BSSID → (expandable) clients on that BSSID.

What you can do

The data is merged from every online AP in the cluster, not just the VC. This is important — a single AP's view of the RF environment is heavily biased toward whichever band it happens to be scanning on. The on-demand per-AP monitor-list pass added in 2.0 is what makes 5 / 6 GHz neighbours visible here.

The RF RSSI Cutoff preference (Settings → Site Settings) hides BSSIDs and SSIDs whose signal is weaker than the configured threshold (Aruba's positive scale — higher = weaker).

Performance

A ranked list of wireless clients flagged for performance issues, scored by how many categories they trigger.

Categories

What you can do

Each row also shows the row's Impacting: list — fast peers on the same AP and band that the flagged client is harming through airtime contention.

Client Detail

The per-client card. Reached from Clients & APs, Clients, the Performance tab, Search, and the Connected Clients list inside AP Detail.

Sections

The Mgmt? label

When Down Speed is below the SSID's configured minimum TX rate (g-min-tx-rate / a-min-tx-rate), the bar is labelled amber "Mgmt?" instead of red "Poor". The snapshot is almost certainly a management frame rather than real data throughput, which is why IoT devices (cameras, smart switches, plugs) used to misleadingly appear as Slow Speed. The doc-icon next to the row opens an explainer sheet.

What you can do

AP Detail

The per-AP card. Reached from Access Points (tap a card) or from any AP / radio row in Clients & APs.

Sections, in order

  1. Identification — name, IP, model, serial, MAC, uplink port, Wi-Fi capability, status, uptime, mode.
  2. Version Support — Instant minimum and maximum supported firmware for the model. An amber warning appears when the model is capped before 8.13.
  3. Power over Ethernet — current and average watts.
  4. LED Status — System LED state, plus a composite Radio LED row with a per-radio breakdown on multi-radio APs.
  5. Radios — one section per active radio: channel, TX Power, Channel Utilisation, and Noise Floor bars.
  6. WLANs — BSSIDs grouped by ESSID, each with PHY, band, and bandwidth.
  7. Spectrum — per-channel Quality, SNIR, WiFi utilisation, non-WiFi breakdown by type, active interferers grouped by band, and recent spectrum alerts. Doc-icon buttons open SNIR and non-WiFi explainer sheets.
  8. Connected Clients — every client currently associated to the AP.

What you can do

Radios configured as Air Monitor show a callout explaining why no FFT data is produced. Channels that returned limited-scan sentinel zeros suppress the misleading Quality and SNIR bars rather than display them as red.

Voice & Video (UCC)

A live view of the Unified-Communications sessions your cluster can see — Wi-Fi calls, FaceTime, and meeting apps (Teams, Zoom, Meet). It's off by default; enable Load UCC Data in Settings to populate it. Reached from the sidebar (iPad) → Analyze, or iPhone Settings → Tools.

What it shows

Sessions are grouped into three sections:

IAPViewer tells an active call from an idle registration by comparing the IPsec tunnel's traffic counters against the previous refresh, cross-checked with call-detail records and datapath sessions on the serving AP.

What you can do

BLE Discovery

Surfaces the Bluetooth Low-Energy environment each AP can hear — asset tags and beacons. Off by default; enable Load BLE Data in Settings. When on, two things appear:

Generic beacons that broadcast from rotating (private) addresses are attributed by their Bluetooth-SIG company ID rather than a hardware vendor; named asset tags (e.g. Aruba tags) are identified directly. The cluster's own AP radios are filtered out of the results.

Naming & icons (Customize)

Any client or BLE device detail card includes a Customize section that lets you pin a friendly name and an icon to that device. The topology tree picks the change up immediately.

Custom names and icons are saved against the device's MAC address. They persist as long as the device keeps a stable address and name — a device using a private (rotating) MAC will lose its custom label when the address next changes.

Access Points (legacy list)

Card grid of every AP — one column on iPhone, two on iPad. Each card shows name, badges (VC, Monitor, constrained-model warning), client count, IP, serial, model, PoE draw (current + average), per-radio channels (colour-coded by band), uptime, and uplink port. A Cluster PoE summary row totals current and average watts. Offline APs sit in a dimmed section at the bottom.

What you can do

Clients (legacy flat list)

The original flat list of every client on the cluster, sortable and filterable. Available from the iPad sidebar, or from iPhone Settings → Legacy Views when the toggle is on.

Filters

The filter strip at the top supports: Online, Offline, Wireless, Wired, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz, WPA3-Ent, WPA3-SAE, WPA2, Open / OWE.

Sort

Sort header bar offers Name, Signal, or Health, ascending or descending. Tap a column header to change sort.

Offline section

Clients you've seen connected to the cluster previously but that are not currently online appear in an Offline section (only visible under the Offline filter). Each row shows last-seen timestamp, last AP, and last SSID. Swipe a row left to delete it; the section header menu can clear them all.

Retention is controlled by Settings → Site Settings → Client History (10 / 30 / 90 / 180 days / 1 year, default 90). Tightening retention shows a confirmation telling you how many entries will be removed.

Channel Quality (legacy list)

Stacked-card list of every channel the cluster's APs are using, grouped by 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. Each card shows channel number, an overlap warning ("Overlaps ch 1 & 6") on non-standard 2.4 GHz channels, Good / OK / Poor pill, a Quality bar, a stacked WiFi/Interference utilisation bar, a Noise Floor bar, and a horizontally scrollable row of AP pills. A warning triangle appears on AP pills that are reporting non-WiFi interference.

Tap any card to open Channel Detail.

RF Locator (experimental)

An on-demand probability estimator for foreign Wi-Fi sources, drawn over a satellite map. To enable it, toggle Settings → Experimental → Show RF Location on.

This is not a precision locator. RF Locator does not put a pin on a neighbour the way GPS would. For each detected foreign source, it takes RSSI readings from your own APs and computes a likely area, with a minimum-TX-power blob and a maximum-TX-power blob (overlap = highest probability).

Setup

The bottom card walks you through the steps: Setup → Place APs → Ready → Analysing → Result.

  1. Tap the SSID button at the top to pick a target foreign BSSID — the list is ranked by RSSI on the 2.4 GHz band.
  2. Tap Place APs, then tap the map to drop a pin for each of your APs. When several APs are unplaced, a sheet asks which AP each pin represents.
  3. Drag an existing pin to move it; tap a pin's callout trash button to remove it.
  4. Tap Analyze (or Refresh if a result is already shown) to compute the area.
  5. Expand the result card to see the RSSI each AP reported for the chosen neighbour.

What controls accuracy

Accuracy depends almost entirely on your AP layout, not on the app. Estimates improve when:

Most production installs were designed for client coverage, not RF geolocation. Expect your own site to fall in that category — broad fuzzy areas are the norm, tight peaks the exception.

Settings tools

Deny List

Every client currently denied by the VC. Each entry shows MAC, manufacturer (or "Unknown · possibly randomised"), countdown to expiry, deny reason, originating AP, timestamp, and a single-line no denylist-client <mac> CLI snippet.

The VC keeps a shallow auth-log buffer (~200 events). For older entries the log may be empty by the time you look.

Config

Read-only view of the cluster's running configuration as plain monospaced text. Long-press to select and copy specific lines.

Logs

Live log viewer. Three pickers at the top:

The running show log <type> <count> command appears as the section header. Each picker change re-runs the fetch after a short debounce. Long-press log lines to select and copy.

VSG Check

A best-practice rule check of the cluster's running config against Aruba's Validated Solutions Guide. Tap Fetch & Validate to pull a fresh running config and run the rule engine.

Results are split into per-SSID sections plus a Global Settings section. Each section carries a pass-percentage pill and "passed / failed / total" subtitle. Tap a check row to expand its What this means and How to fix explanations.

Attribution credits Aaron Scott's Central Automation Studio, which inspired the rule set. Flagged checks indicate deviation from the VSG — not confirmed misconfiguration.

Firmware (Upgrade Planner)

Helps understand the impact of a firmware upgrade on the AP fleet before you commit to it.

The capability database is bundled with the app and refreshed automatically in the background when a newer version is published.

Event Log

A per-site record of what happened during your connection sessions — built for diagnosing intermittent problems after the fact. Open it from the site editor (next to Test API) or from Settings → Advanced Tuning → View Event Log. It keeps the current run plus the last few runs for the site.

What it captures

What you can do

For deep troubleshooting, turn on Verbose API Trace (Settings → Advanced Tuning) — it records every call, not just failures. It's noisy, so leave it off for normal use.

Exports

Reports and CSV / script exports. Reached from the sidebar (iPad) → App → Exports, or from iPhone Settings → Tools → Exports.

Format picker

Choose Plain Text or PDF at the top. PDF renders in 8-point monospaced on A4 via the iOS share sheet.

Available exports

Rows whose source data hasn't been loaded yet are dimmed with a "Visit the X tab to load data first" caption. Tap a row to render the report and open the iOS share sheet.

Search

A dedicated client search. Available from the sidebar (iPad) → Monitor → Search, or from the iPhone tab bar.

Type into the bar to match against client name, wired hostname, IP, MAC, and manufacturer. Tap a result to open Client Detail. Cancel clears the query.

Settings

Reached from the sidebar (iPad) → App → Settings, or from the iPhone tab bar. The page is organised into sections from top to bottom; on iPhone portrait, additional Tools and Legacy / Experimental groups appear above the standard sections.

Display & Appearance

Site Settings

Spectrum

Channel View

Two sliders that control the foreign-SSID ghost-bar scale on the spectrum chart:

Topology

Voice/Video & BLE data

Each optional-load toggle (Spectrum, BLE, UCC) carries a small colour dot matching its segment on the load bar, so you can tell at a glance which stage a colour represents.

Device Icons

Tap Device Icon Rules to open the rule editor. Each rule maps a hostname keyword to an SF Symbol; the first match wins. Rules sort alphabetically. In the editor:

Advanced Tuning

Experimental

Quick reference

Where each tool lives

TooliPad / MaciPhone
Clients & APs (tree)Sidebar → MonitorTab bar
Channels (Channel View)Sidebar → MonitorTab bar
RF NeighborsSidebar → MonitorTab bar
SearchSidebar → Monitor(via tree search)
RF LocatorSidebar → Monitor (when enabled)Settings → Experimental → RF Location
Voice & Video (UCC)Sidebar → AnalyzeSettings → Tools
BLE DiscoverySidebar → App / SettingsSettings
Event LogSite editor / Settings → Advanced TuningSite editor / Settings → Advanced Tuning
Clients (legacy)Sidebar → LegacySettings → Legacy Views
Access Points (legacy)Sidebar → LegacySettings → Legacy Views
Channel Quality (legacy)Sidebar → LegacySettings → Legacy Views
Performance (legacy)Sidebar → LegacySettings → Legacy Views
Deny ListSidebar → AnalyzeSettings → Analyze
ConfigSidebar → AnalyzeSettings → Analyze
LogsSidebar → AnalyzeSettings → Analyze
VSG CheckSidebar → AnalyzeSettings → Analyze
FirmwareSidebar → AnalyzeSettings → Analyze
ExportsSidebar → AppSettings → Tools
SettingsSidebar → AppTab bar
DisconnectSidebar → AppTab bar

If something goes wrong

Most operational issues — load stalls, API errors, intermittent failures on Central-managed clusters, the fallback IP rebind scenario — are covered in detail on the Support page under Common Issues. The short version:

Contact

IAPViewer is developed and maintained as a side project. Support is best-effort.

Email: support@bdlfoundry.dev
Support site: https://iapviewer.bdlfoundry.dev
Typical response: 1–2 weeks for non-critical issues

See also: Support · API Reference · Privacy Policy · Terms of Use


IAPViewer is developed independently and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by HPE, Aruba Networks, or any of their subsidiaries.
Aruba and Aruba Networks are registered trademarks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Apple, App Store, iPhone, iPad, and TestFlight are trademarks of Apple Inc.
IEEE is a registered trademark of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.