topic Re: Meraki MR CPU utilization in Wireless

Meraki MR CPU utilization

yappsyduck — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 14:12:36 GMT

May i know how to view Meraki MR CPU utilization and other hardware resource performance?

Re: Meraki MR CPU utilization

BrechtSchamp — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 14:24:39 GMT

Unless I'm mistaken, that information is not made available in the dashboard nor in the API. In case of problems you should get an error via the event log and syslog.

Re: Meraki MR CPU utilization

kYutobi — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 14:31:31 GMT

For the MR? I do not believe you can see that. This is what the CPU does for the MRs if that's what you were looking for. Like @BrechtSchamp said, no real info is provided.

Distributed Packet Processing
Meraki devices execute packet processing at the edge. Each wireless
access point features a high performance CPU that enforces layer
3-7 firewall policies, application QoS, network access control (NAC),
and more. Meraki networks scale seamlessly: add capacity by simply
deploying more APs, without concern for controller bottlenecks or
choke points.
Every Meraki wireless access point is built with the packet
processing resources to secure and control its client traffic, without
need for a wireless LAN controller. Meraki APs are built with a high
performance CPU, hardware-accelerated encryption, and extended
memory resources to implement stateful firewall policies, voice and
video optimization, and even layer 7 traffic classification and QoS.

Re: Meraki MR CPU utilization

yappsyduck — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 14:35:23 GMT

Meraki TAC support can view the hardware performance?

Re: Meraki MR CPU utilization

BrechtSchamp — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 15:17:22 GMT

They can see more than us mere mortals, yes. 🙂

Re: Meraki MR CPU utilization

daviscot — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 05:11:39 GMT

Hey team @BrechtSchamp @yappsyduck @kYutobi Unfortunately you are unable to view the CPU and Memory utilization of the Meraki devices, although I will confirm that Meraki Support can see it, and they can report it back to you if needed. The historical reason is that without an intimate knowledge of the hardware architecture and operating system internals, and what processes might be CPU versus memory-bound, the numbers can be a red herring and could be case generators even though all might be normal.

I have made the argument in more ways than one that there is still value in having access to that information, but it has yet to be exposed in the Dashboard UI. For example I argue there is value in getting a baseline of CPU/Mem utilization to compare before an after a firmware upgrade, or before and after the implementation of a new feature. Or for example to be able to visualize CPU or memory steadily climbing to the max level and remaining maxed-out over a period of time.

However other ideas/tools are in the works to provide other performance indicators (as opposed to direct CPU/Memory readings) to get more insight into the health of the infrastructure devices, and without the need to even get the baseline first because it would be historical. So keep making wishes, they do help, and stay tuned.

My hope is there would be something similar to the device utilization graph for an MX appliance on the Summary Report page, along with the API call to return the perf score of the MX. In addition, if you look in the API docs, you'll notice the API endpoint for "return the performance score of a device" is in the "Devices" section, so it's not MX-specific. Hopefully this is an indication this could be used for other types of devices in time, at which point it would make it to the UI as well.

Re: Meraki MR CPU utilization

Patient5150 — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 20:29:56 GMT

Hi Meraki Dave,

Any updates on this? It's ridiculous that we still don't have access to these metrics. We need this information to be able to scale properly. Does Cisco not want us to spend more money? Seems counter-productive.

Jim