Cisco Prime Reporting - Guest Sessions

[tcollins89]

Hi all,

I'm hoping to get some insight into the Client Sessions report in Cisco Prime, as well as some potential alternatives. Currently, we run the Client Sessions report monthly to get a count of wireless sessions across all sites. Prior to February, all APs were on a Cisco 5508 WLC, and we saw roughly 150-200k sessions in the monthly report. Since then, we have migrated all APs to a 9800 WLC, and the number of sessions has risen dramatically. 

January (on old WLC) - ~180k sessions

February (during migration to new WLC) - ~360k sessions

March (post migration) - ~755k sessions

While we did have to configure things slightly differently on the new controller, the SSIDs are more or less identical to what we ran on the old WLC. We haven't added any new APs and nothing else indicates that an increase of that magnitude would be accurate. My main question is if the new wireless controller is defining "session" completely differently than the old controller did, and what that definition might be.

Additionally, if the purpose of running this report is to see how many wireless users we have in a given month, is there a more effective report that may provide more useful information? Bonus points if it can be run based on the previous calendar month (which would help greatly with scheduling).

Thanks in advance!

[Flavio Miranda]

Hi

  Cisco Prime and 9800 does not talk very well though. But I would prefer Unique Clients report.  Client sessions will register everytime any client access the network which leads to a high number but not necessary give you a picture of the client amount as clients can connect many times due client problem, signal etc.

[tcollins89]

I appreciate the reply. When I do run the Unique Clients report for a specific range of dates (for example, I ran it today for 4/1/2023-5/1/2023, it includes several random dates from the past year or so. I've attached a screen grab of what it's showing. Is there some kind of report formatting we're missing that is causing these dates to be added to the report?

[Flavio Miranda]

You probably got hit on this Bug

https://bst.cisco.com/bugsearch/bug/CSCvv13192

[tcollins89]

That bug is listed as Fixed, and we're running Prime 3.9, but it also says there is no workaround. Is it fixed or not? When we run the report, the correct dates are included, it's just also appending dates well outside of the specified range.

[Flavio Miranda]

If you have the change, open a TAC case. This can be the same Bug or one similar. But it smell like a bug, that´s for sure.