Portal user guide
What each part of the CNA portal is for and how to get answers from it. For everyone who uses the portal, whatever their role.
Views are being consolidated in the next release. This guide describes each view by its purpose, not by menu path or position on screen. The views you see depend on the services your organisation uses.
The home view
The landing page when you sign in. It answers "is anything wrong right now?" across every service you have.
- Counts online: office sensors, end-user devices and servers currently reporting.
- Application averages: the average application response seen by each source, shown red, amber or green, so you can tell at a glance whether users are affected.
- Active alerts: everything currently firing that needs attention.
- Service-provider feeds: the latest status and news published by the providers your services depend on, so "is it us or them?" is answered in one place.
- Shortcuts to the office, end-user device and infrastructure views you subscribe to.
Office monitoring
Office views show what your sensors measure, either across all sites at once or for one site. Start with all sites to see whether a problem is local or general, then open a site from the list of offices.
| If you see… | It usually means… |
|---|---|
| One site slow, the rest fine | A local cause: the office network, Wi-Fi or circuit |
| Every site slow | The provider or the application |
| One application slow, the others normal | The application, not the network |
| Sensors fine but laptops slow | The device |
Application response
How long each application takes to respond to the sensors' web requests. Each sensor tests every configured application every two minutes. The view shows an average for each application, then a graph over time, so you can compare applications side by side.
For a single site, the application view also shows the ping response time and the network path to each application.
DNS
How long name lookups take from the sensors, as an average and over time. A timeline of lookup results shows problems at a glance:
| Result | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 0 | Success |
| 1 | Timeout |
| 2 | Error |
The DNS response codes returned by the server are shown alongside.
WAN circuits
Each office circuit is probed from the cloud, looking back at the office's public IP address. It is the one measurement in CNA taken from outside your offices. For each circuit you see the average round-trip time and packet loss for the current period, the last 7 days and the last 30 days, then a graph with round-trip time in milliseconds on the left axis and packet loss as a percentage on the right.
Network path
A hop-by-hop trace from the sensors to each application, with the latency at every hop. Use it to tell whether the delay starts inside the office, at your internet provider or at the application's edge, and hand the provider evidence rather than a complaint.
Wi-Fi
Each floor that has a wireless map has its own Wi-Fi view. Open it from the site.
The floor map
Your floor plan, with each sensor drawn where it sits and coloured by the signal it receives. The average signal strength and reception quality for the floor are shown with it.
| Colour | Signal |
|---|---|
| Green | Above −67 dBm |
| Amber | −68 to −75 dBm |
| Red | Below −75 dBm |
Use the time slider under the map to move back and forward through the selected time range, for example to replay a bad morning.
Select a sensor's label to open its detail.
Sensor detail
Everything one sensor knows about its Wi-Fi connection. Signal, quality, link rate and access point are measured every 15 seconds.
| Shown | Use it to |
|---|---|
| Connection | See the network name (SSID), the access point (BSSID), channel and channel width the sensor is using |
| Sensor MAC address | Give your wireless provider what they need to find the sensor in their own tools |
| Signal and quality over time | Signal in dBm and reception quality as a percentage. Drag across a graph to zoom in. |
| Roaming | See when the sensor moved from one access point to another, and what that did to the signal |
| Transmit and receive rates | Spot a link that is connected but slow |
| Nearby networks | A scan every 15–20 minutes of the 24 strongest access points around the sensor, with network name, channel, BSSID, frequency and encryption, as a table and on a timeline. Hidden networks are included. Scans are kept for 24 hours. |
ModelA sensors also report noise and signal-to-noise ratio.
End-user devices
If you use the end-user device agent, these views show what each user's own Windows device experiences. Unlike a sensor, the agent reports only while the device is switched on.
Device list
One row per device, with counts of devices reporting and applications monitored at the top.
- User, operating system, build and model of each device.
- CPU, memory and system disk as coloured cells, so a device running out of resources stands out.
- Wi-Fi signal as a coloured bar.
- Public IP address of the connection, which can be mapped to your offices so you can see who is working where.
- Agent version.
Below the list are application response averages from all devices and an overview of the estate's Wi-Fi, CPU, memory and disk.
Device detail
Open a device from the list. A device selector shows which devices are online, so you can switch between them without checking which are reporting.
- The device: operating system, uptime, CPU, memory and system disk with their use.
- Connectivity: if you use Zscaler, the laptop agent shows the Zscaler client connection details.
- Wi-Fi: signal, receive and transmit rates and traffic, with a timeline that also shows roaming between access points, and a scan of nearby networks every 15–20 minutes, kept for 24 hours.
- Network interface: throughput, packets per second, discards and errors.
- Resources: CPU, memory, disk and the processes running.
Application reachability per device
From a device, open its application reachability view: the same application, ping and network-path information as a site's application view, measured from that device. Compare it with the sensors at the same office to tell a device problem from a network one.
Servers
If you use the server and VM agent, the infrastructure views show CPU, memory, disk and network for your Linux and Windows servers, whether critical processes are running and how long each certificate has before it expires, on the same timeline as the office measurements. See Infrastructure monitoring for what is collected.
The AI assistant
Ask the portal what's going on, in plain English. The assistant answers from your own data: it can explain what a view shows and suggest what to check next. It helps people interpret the data. It does not detect anomalies or raise alerts by itself: alerts still follow the thresholds your administrators set.
Start with the questions your service desk asks every day, such as "what does the data on this view mean?" or "what should I check next?"
The assistant is included as standard for up to 3 users. More about it: The portal. How it handles your data: FAQ.
Working with dashboards
| To… | Do this |
|---|---|
| Change the time range | Open the time picker. Choose a relative range, such as the last 12 hours, yesterday or this week so far, or set an absolute range with a start and end date and time. |
| Zoom in | Drag across the part of a graph you want to see. |
| Zoom out | Use the zoom-out control to widen the time range. |
| Refresh | Use the refresh control to update now, or pick an automatic refresh interval. Views don't refresh automatically unless you set one. |
| Keep a favourite | Star the view. Starred views are easy to find again, and you can make one your home view. |
| Share what you see | Share by link, or as a snapshot of the data at that moment. |
| Show it on a NOC wall | Switch to view (kiosk) mode, which hides the menus for a large screen. |
| Focus on one graph | Open a panel full screen from its menu. Click a series in a legend to show or hide it. |
| Find a view | Search by view name or panel title. |
| Learn the shortcuts | Press ? to list every keyboard shortcut. |
Time ranges use the time zone in your preferences.
Your account
Open your profile to manage the following.
| Setting | Notes |
|---|---|
| Password | Change it at any time if you have a CNA account. Not available when you sign in through your identity provider: change it there, or ask your administrator. |
| Profile | Your name, user name and email address. |
| Preferences | Theme (light or dark), your home view, time zone, the first day of the week used by ranges such as "this week", and the interface language. |
| Sessions | See where your account is signed in. If you suspect someone else has used your credentials, sign out the other sessions, then change your password. |
Your preferences take precedence over your organisation's defaults.
The CNA portal is built on Grafana.