Part 130: Results of Zabbix Summit 2025 wifi connection quality

First of all, THANK YOU all the Zabbix employees and summit visitors. Zabbix Summit 2025 was fantastic as always!

I truly did monitor the Zabbix Summit main hall wifi connection quality with my laptop. Results should be taken with a grain of salt, as these were measured with my about ten years old Dell Latitude E7450 laptop with FreeBSD 14.3, so there's potential downgrade of everything thanks to that combo.

How did I monitor the quality?

My FreeBSD runs the following each minute via cron:

/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 list sta | tail -n 1 >/tmp/wifi.txt

If you have no idea what the command returns, here it is with the tail part stripped:

ADDR               AID CHAN RATE RSSI IDLE  TXSEQ  RXSEQ CAPS FLAG
fc:34:97:6f:ff:5c   41   36  54M 61.0    0   1765  41056 EP   AQU          RSN HTCAP VHTCAP VHTOPMODE VHTPWRENV WPS WME

As you can see, there's MAC address, channel, connection rate, RSSI and so forth. 

Zabbix part

On Zabbix, I created a very small wifi monitoring template, tailored for FreeBSD. 

In other words, Zabbix Agent reads the /tmp/wifi.txt file contents and then the dependent items parse the relevant snippet from there with regular expressions.

Example regular expression as text: [^\s]+\s*[^\s]+\s*[^\s]+\s*([^M]+).*

The results

Not stellar, or depending on how you think of it. 500+ creme de la creme nerds gathered under the same roof must be challenging for the hotel wifi.

Connection rate first saw some 54 Mbit/s connections, then dropping to way worse levels than that. You may also observe how I dutifully took my laptop with me during each break.

With wifi connection RSSI, the results fluctuated quite a bit, but the RSSI itself looks surprisingly good. This makes me a bit suspicious if my laptop & OS combo did stuff, but on the other hand, the throughput experience was not blazing fast through my iPhone 16, either.

Response time to my blog was a bit high. This is just a standard Zabbix web scenario, loading the main page source code, but does not load the images etc.

Compare the results when measured with my home Raspberry Pi 4:

I will polish the wifi template a bit and then release it on my GitHub, as it definitely can be useful for some real use cases, too.