AirMagnet Survey PRO Reviews

We are using the multi-floor planner, which is very useful for us to create heat maps. We are also using the AirMagnet site survey. It's really helpful for us to know in which areas we are losing the signal and in which areas the signals are very good. So, this is very nice for us.

We have created lots of plans through this AirMagnet tool. It's very good.

Whenever we are doing the site survey, it will catch most of the areas. However, for example, if we are creating the plan after doing the site survey, in some areas, it will show some signals but actually the signals are not there. The client will ask, "It is showing the signal here, but actually the signals are very weak. Even though it is still showing the green light." So, that is the only concern and the problem area. It will show the signal, but actually there will be less signal. That is the only part which can improve.

There are some requirements for new access points for Cisco. Right now, as to what access points we are using, we are not getting the same model more or less. It should have some updates. They should include those new access points, i.e., whichever access points Cisco or any other vendors are making, so they should be there. They should include them in their upgrades and updates, so that we can easily give those specifics to access points and we can start our work. But as of now, what I have found is that there are some model numbers that I'm not able to get the model number in AirMagnet. (I forget the exact model number, actually.) Hence, what we did was, we created it manually. We manually created the access point. Thus, if AirMagnet can upgrade the new model number for the access points and can include it in the updates, it would be really helpful for us (mostly for Cisco).

It should work faster than the current version that we have and should include some more features that can help us. It would benefit us, if we could have some more features. This is totally up to the developers, so as to include the specific features in a later version and how they can build up some new features that can help us. That would be good.

I have used the AirMagnet solution for the last year, i.e., for more than a year or so.

In regards to the stability, things are okay. I didn't find any problem with the software as such. Everything was fine. As of now, it's fine. I didn't find any difficulty other than that. It's a good software.

As for the scalability, it's okay because we are doing at a time up to 15 access points with the controller support; so based on that, it's fine. There's no scalability problem and we can do more access points also at a time.

We were doing at least 3-4 surveys before when our project was here and it was a big project. So we are doing at least 3 to 4 surveys per day and it was good. It's all good. There's no issue with the scalability. It's fine.

The last time one of my colleagues opened a ticket for some installation, as there was some problem with the installation/re-installation, we got proper support from the technical guys. There's no issue with support.

Personally, I didn't use any site survey software before, but I don't know about my colleagues. Maybe they used something else. Once I joined this company, I started with AirMagnet itself. Before there was some Snyder solution which was a free software that we used. However, comparing that to this tool, AirMagnet is a good and reliable solution. It's not giving us fake results; it's in real time.

The setup was simple and very straightforward. There's no complexity as such. It's simple.

As I mentioned earlier, the only thing is that we are not able to find the new devices from vendors like Cisco and Aruba; access points. We need them to include those access points and it would be really helpful for us. The rest of the things are okay. It is a good solution. My advice is to include only the newer version of the access points in the AirMagnet tool, so that it will be really helpful for us.

I'm using it both for designing purposes and for active site survey.

It's helping me a lot for designing and for carrying out large implementations. By using this tool, we can also deploy a very big WiFi network. I have used other solutions like the Ekahau Wi-Fi tools, but I think this one is more user-friendly.

In terms of the graphical representations, it can be improved.

Right now, the AirMagnet has the latest features, such as the 3-D structure feature, as opposed to the other solutions. I think that was implemented in the last year. So, that was the best feature and the scope of improvement in that sense.

I have been using this product for the last four years.

I feel like the software crashed on my laptop so many times, as compared to when I was using the Ekahau, but it's fine. For me, while using the AirMagnet, it crashed on my laptop around two to three times and this is my experience that I had with the AirMagnet range.

It crashed at any time and affected my work in regards to saving stuff and things like that. Also, it had a small impact while getting back to what I was doing. I didn't save it when I was working on a somewhat big project and it happened to me about two or three times.

In terms of capacity, it's stable. AirMagnet is stable in regards to the traffic and capacity. I did not feel any difficulty with scalability.

I did not use any technical support.

At first, I started my work in WiFi designing with AirMagnet and then later on, I switched to other solutions so as to seek better compatibility, to check how it works, etc.

I wanted to check what are the differences and extra features that are being provided by other vendors, so that's why I switched to another vendor. Thus, simultaneously I was using maybe two or three solutions at a time. However, I prioritized the AirMagnet ones.

The setup was simple. Even if you don't have much knowledge in terms of WiFi, you will be able to understand what features are included in the software.

In terms of the prices, I am aware how much this product costs and the other vendor prices as well. However, I don't know how to compare them. In regards to the means of solution or the technical aspects, it's easy to implement it for an open-minded person.

When I first started using it, I was forced to use this solution because my company was only providing AirMagnet for me. That is when I used AirMagnet for the first time and later on, I got a chance to go check out other solutions. Thus, I didn't get a chance to evaluate other products during my first time experience. Later on, I did look at other tools.

I will definitely suggest the AirMagnet solution for WiFi implementations. This is the best solution that I can suggest to others.

It carries out wireless surveys and records wireless signal strength. That's what we use it for.

The software really does what it has been doing for years now. It records the wireless signal strengths and that's mainly it. It doesn't really improve our process. It just does what it's supposed to.

Since it crashes 1 out of 20 times, it would be great if they could make it more stable.

We use it on a daily basis, and it crashes 1 out of 20 times.

It seems to be something with the software, or with the Windows' configuration.

We have used technical support. They obviously continue working on improving it. Their support is good.

We haven't really used any other solution because there really wasn't anything out there like AirMagnet. It had no other competition at that time.

The setup was pretty straightforward.

The more you use, the better you get at it.

Spectrum XT running at the same time during survey mode: It allows me to investigate after the survey to see what was causing the interference and mitigate it before installing the access points.

The reports that are generated are very good and a customer can make since of them.

The ability to run both 2.4 GHz and 5GHz active surveys at the same time for 802.11n applications is a real time saver you don’t have to walk the floor twice to gather the data you need.

Another valuable feature is the ability to use CAD drawings and to select layers within the CAD drawing to cut down on clutter and make the CAD files easier to work with.

The ability to tie the license to a wireless adapter MAC or the MAC of the computer is a nice feature especially if you want to use the software on more than one computer.

AirMagnet allows our organization to relatively quickly provide our customers with a budgetary solution that meets their business needs.

The planner function would be better if there was the ability to change the antenna orientation for external antenna, e.g., tilt angle.

The multi-floor alignment tool is not very good; only having to use two points and hope that they line up is tough. I have had to alter the floor plan’s scale to get the alignment tool to work correctly.

Having better capacity planning, the ability to add different client devices would be nice.

The user manual is quite in depth; it would be nice for the price that you pay for the product that there could be a link in the user guide to see exactly how to use/run a particular function other than screen shots. For example, conducting VoFi Surveys:

I have used AirMagnet Survey Pro for 11 years. I have used AirMagnet Planner for six years.

No deployment issues where encountered during the installation process. At the time we purchased the software there were still CDs to install the software, it was very straight forward.

I have not encountered any stability issues with this version at all; a very vast improvement from some of the earlier versions.

I have not encountered any scalability issues; AirMagnet has made some substantial improvements with the product with each release.

The Gold Support is the best that I have dealt with. Everyone that I have encountered is very knowledgeable with the product and issues are quickly resolved, especially the ones are user orientated!!

AirMagnet was the first product that we have used since day one. We also use Ekahau in our tool kit.

Setup is very easy, very straightforward just download the new software and license and you are good to go.

It is worth mentioning that you need to delete the current version of software you are using before installing a newer version.

The MAJOR concern that I have with AirMagnet is the cost of the Gold Support renewal. It is very costly compared to Ekahau.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options; AirMagnet at that time was the only product available.

The product is very good and I highly recommend it, especially if you have to present the survey finding to clients.

This is an absolutely needed tool for the WLAN professional!!

The interactive mapping tool: If you have a map, it'll scale the map to be accurate. You literally just click where you are as you are walking. It's very simple. Then, from that mapping, you can run reports and get a lot of information.

Bandwidth Monitoring: They have an option to set up iPerf on a server and it will check bandwidth as you do your survey to make sure your users have a quality WiFi experience.

Reports: The reports are amazing and very easy to run. At first you may need some assistance understanding what to do with the data but that’s just the technical part you will learn.

Android Mobile APP: They have a version of this that can run on Android. For quick surveys that you can later import into Air Magnet this can be really handy for your field technicians to share or use for troubleshooting.

We survey hospitals, schools and any other business that would like a survey. We sell our service and it creates another avenue for revenue.

If you have an older version of Air Magnet get caught up. It use to crash a lot. Version 9.1 is great. It’ll run all day with no issues (we always restart at lunch time). The only main improvement point I can make is offer free training

We have used it for about 9 months.

We use to have issues with crashing. If you do just get it updated. It’s worth it! It’s much better!

No issues. I’ve heard people say they’d like to do multiple floors on one survey but I like having the smaller surveys to work with anyway.

Tech support does a pretty good job. I’d give them a 8 or 9 out of ten.

We didn't have a previous solution.

Setup is a little complex, not because of any issues but because of the nature of the beast. You have to know a lot of different things to make it work properly, but that might just be because the software is complex. Not in a bad way; there's just a lot of things you have to know. A few more wizards for setup would help us not forget things. It’d be nice to have a wizard that asked if you are doing certain channels or both bands, etc.

The only reason we use this software is because the people that hire us to do the surveys require the software. We then found other ways to create revenue with it since it is very expensive.

My biggest complaint is their training shouldn't be so expensive. I personally think they should have online videos of free training and if you want to have a need for more complex training then pay for a class. Maybe a “how to understand reports” class would be nice! If they would give us some training, it wouldn't feel so complicated. Their training is so expensive, it's hard to be good at it without spending a lot more money and when you already spent $4000 on the software it’s not a good feeling to open the software and not know what to do next.

Get training or ask others since training is so expensive. Try YouTube videos and just ask others to get some details. If it’s too complex after watching YouTube then you may ask for training with your purchase or something like that. I wish we did!

• Planning module - I use it for wireless network deployment at the construction stage.
• Survey module - wireless coverage map and spectrum date integration is useful for checking the wireless coverage and performance.

Before using this product we performed a wireless project design with a rough understanding of how the wireless network should look like. Very often the final quantity of APs was not what was planned on paper. With AirMagnet Survey we can make a floor plan import. Now in v9.1 we have the possibility to even use the AutoCAD floor plan where the walls, doors, and window materials are designed by an engineer, and the survey can apply this characteristic by itself which decreases our time preparing the floor plans.

AirMagnet Survey then automatically calculates the required number of access points, which is quite close to the final quantity. After deploying the access points we make a coverage map report for the customer including data about interference, physical data rates, noise level, signal noise ratio coverage, user capacity, and throughput.

It helps us to fully support 802.11 a/b/n/g/ac standards.

AirMagnet Survey is very useful for designing and deploying wireless 802.11n/a/b/g/ac projects, in any company from small offices to large campus buildings.

We have been using AirMagnet Survey about five years, since it was from Fluke Networks and now it is a Netscout brand.

Yes, normally it happens with products from different vendors. We have had a problem with the reporting module, as it can't put the full size picture of a floor plan in the report. After we initiated several support cases these problems were solved with the new release.

A year ago there was a problem with huge floor plan pictures which was hanging up the software during reporting. It was solved with the release update.

Technical support is one of the important things that customers appreciate, and Netscout have some very qualified engineers who help very rapidly with every question.

Yes we used the Ekahau Site Survey, which is also a good quality product, but they are still growing and have lots of bugs. These guys try to do their best and it looks like they are good professionals on their job. We chose the AirMagnet Survey because it was recommended by Cisco, also we like the functionality of it and of course the main reason was the Russian localization of reports which is essential in our country.

AirMagnet is a very stable and time-tested product, as proved by the fact that the world's leading IT companies use AirMagnet Survey and if we look at the release notes we can see a lot of new features instead of bug fixes as in the Ekahau Site Survey.

Installation is very simple, you just need to register the software key on the AirMagnet web account, then download and install the software on your PC, every time clicking the "Next" button.

The price is not so high compared with other products of similar quality. My recommendation for customers is to periodically renew the support contract, because some software releases which contain new interesting features can be downloaded only if you maintain an active support contract. As this product now belongs to Netscout I'm sure they will develop it to be much more interesting and useful.

Yes, before purchasing we requested evaluation software of each AirMagnet product: AirMagnet Survey Pro, AirMagnet WiFi Analyzer, AirMagnet Spectrum XT.

Also we compared it with Ekahau Site Survey as it is the only quality product with the same functionality, but our purchasing decision was AirMagnet Survey.

My advice, before purchasing request an evaluation license to test it and then choose the product which is stable, useful, and very well known in the IT industry.

I use AirMagnet Survey heavily for the work that I do. My responsibility is to make sure that we have good coverage in our facilities. I have also used it in the past to do the site survey for placement of APs in a hospital.

I use it heavily, primarily for troubleshooting issues where there are complaints of inadequate coverage in an area. The product itself provides us a visual tool that we can use to show our clients that the wireless is either working or not working in that area. We use it to make adjustments, if we have to, to the coverage.

The product is working much better than it had been. We can get it down to a tablet now, which was something that I was asking for. Now, we can run it on a Microsoft Surface. I don't use it now quite as heavily as I had been.

I have been using AirMagnet since 2005; about 12 years.

We will get lockups every now and then. I still get those; not near as frequently as I used to. The product seems to be much more stable than it was even six years ago. I just used the product at a couple different sites and I think I only had one lockup in probably three or four hours of work, which is good. It was actually the application that locked up because everything else on the tablet was still functioning.

I used to have a lot of problems if we had a large amount of data. If we were doing a large area in a passive survey and we had a large amount of data, it would stop recording. I've not run into that problem now for the last three years. I can do a large-area passive survey and it will continue to record without issue.

Improvements in laptops and other devices has helped. I'm currently running it on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. I have not run into that problem since moving to that device and with the latest versions.

I had a couple issues a long time ago primarily around lockups and those types of issues. Also, when we were collecting a large amount of data, it would stop collecting data. I had talked to technical support about that at the time. That was a long time ago; probably 8-10 years ago. They were helpful. We tried several things to resolve the problem. The problem was probably resolved with newer hardware and improvements that were made to the program over the years. The stability of the application now is probably the best it's been, from my point of view.

We did not have a solution prior to AirMagnet. This goes clear back to 2005. I was getting ready to start doing site surveys for installing wireless networks in hospitals in Iowa. I had four large hospitals and roughly 100 clinics to survey and I was looking for a product. This was recommended by a colleague, so we went ahead and purchased AirMagnet Survey. At that time, it was called Laptop Trio. We used that to perform the actual site surveys for all of our hospitals.

When we first got AirMagnet back in 2005, I had a Fujitsu laptop. It was convertible to a tablet. We got the product purchased. I installed it and was doing surveys within a couple of hours. It's very straightforward. I've not had a lot of trouble with it.

Again, I've been working with it for 12 years. I'm familiar with it. Sometimes, I'm a little rusty, so it takes a little while to figure out how to do a survey again, but it's not that difficult.

At the time we bought this, it was one of only a couple products out there that was as thorough at what it did. With the proliferation of wireless in our facilities, and throughout everywhere, we've become a very mobile society.

I have been approached in the last year about another product that's out there that's not as expensive as AirMagnet. One of the problems with AirMagnet, in our organization, is the cost it takes to maintain our licensing. We've purchased the product and it feels like you're purchasing it every year again.

There's a product by MetaGeek called inSSIDer. That product is a 1/10 of the cost. And it does very similar functions to AirMagnet. I'm very familiar with AirMagnet, but have been looking at inSSIDer. The cost difference for our organization starts leaning us. We can afford to put inSSIDer in more hands with our technical folks than we can with AirMagnet.

I've maintained a license for this since 2005. I've got the Spectrum Analyzer. I've got AirMagnet Survey PRO. We had Laptop Trio. That continued maintenance cost is starting to seem a bit extreme compared to other products out in the market.

We did not look at anything else. This came highly recommended and that's what we went with. I didn't look at any other products.

If you're going to use it the way that we use it, I strongly recommend going to a tablet device that's as light as possible. The Surface Pro 3 is about 3.3 pounds. This is one of the things that I had actually talked to AirMagnet about not that long ago; maybe two years ago. I had asked them if they would port it over to an Android device, which was considerably lighter than a Surface Pro at the time. 3.3 pounds doesn't seem like a lot until you spend eight hours a day, five days a week, carrying the device around on your arm with it cocked.

You've got to constantly be putting a mark or, with a pen, you're constantly tapping as you're doing the survey. Now, that thing gets heavy. That would be one thing; if they could get it ported over to run on an Android device that weighs under a pound. That's a huge difference.

I'm not sold on it, like an Apple iPad, but either an iOS or an Android-based device where we can get it onto a tablet and it weighs less than the Microsoft Surface. I've seen guys using this that are carrying around a laptop. You get down to an Android device, it costs a few hundred dollars to buy that and you can run this product on that device. It becomes much more attractive than going out and buying a $1700 Surface Pro. It depends on how often you use it.

I liked two features the most:

• Multi-Floor Planner: We use it for multi-floor heat maps or for more than one heat map in one document.
• Planner: We use it for active site surveys. This feature is also very good.

It has helped us a lot in a very big hospital project with five buildings, each with more than 10 floors. We had to do an active survey on site and also provide the heat map. It helped us in giving us the best results.

Last year, we had a project where the client was using Cisco 1700 series AP and they asked for a heat map. We have to select the exact model in the list provided in AirMagnet and, at that time, Cisco AP 1700 series was not present in the list provided. We have to add the device manually by adding its path and details. If the available list of APs is updated, it will be very good.

I’ve used AirMagnet for almost two years.

No stability issues were encountered while we were using it.

No scalability issues were encountered while we were using it.

Customer service is very good, supportive and quick in response.

We did not have any previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have our in-house team and I am involved in the team for the deployments.

ROI is always the best satisfaction that we get after the 99% accurate results.

I definitely recommend this product because of its features, flexibility, accuracy and ease of use.