It's easy to see wifi details on macOS using Settings built into Ventura and earlier releases. However, I am looking to find signal strength and/or signal quality in a log file. For example, I can collect some network and wifi details by use of a third-party agent, but have not found an on-disk location or log file on macOs that has signal strength and/or signal quality.
Does anyone know where this data may be found?
I don't believe that macOS writes a history log file of WiFi signal strength or signal quality. As these are continuously changing every few seconds, any such log file would be monstrous in size.
You can see view the current (and changing) values by pressing the option-key before clicking your Wi-Fi icon in the menu extras menu bar area.
Hold down the Option key while clicking on the WiFi icon in the top menu bar. There you find “Enable Wi-Fi Logging”. You will also find “Create Diagnostic Report..."
Thank you both for your replies, but there must be a way to programmatically get this info or from a periodically written log. For example, we have an agent that can get the aforementioned network and wifi (e.g. SSID) details. What we have not found is a way to get signal quality or strength at the time that the agent queries for other data. This is the problem I'm trying to solve.
Indeed, this is easy for a user sitting at their Mac. However, that won't help a Helpdesk staffer (for example) looking at a trouble ticket without being in contact with the user.
Other thoughts?
Unfortunately, I'm with a software company that is looking to add this capability to its IT asset management product. We don't have such a relationship with Apple Engineering, else that would be a good suggestion. For this reason I was trying the Apple Community.
Thanks for taking the time to help.
Well, if this involves IT surveillance then have them contact Apple engineering about this. IT departments should always have contact access to Apple’s Enterprise support.
macOS log file that shows wifi signal quality or signal strength
