Replicating Summary Report "Usage Over Time"

[Eddysanoli]

Hello,

I've been developing a couple of solutions that analyze the bandwidth usage of a network, in order to trigger actions and impose limitations. Unfortunately, one of the issues that I have found is that I haven't found a proper endpoint to replicate the results that you would see whenever you go to "Network-wide > Monitor > Summary Report". Whenever you get an excel report from there, you get a sheet named "Usage over time".

I thought that using the Network Appliance Uplinks Usage History endpoint, but this doesn't lead to the same results. I've looked through all of the available endpoints and there are a ton of "usage history" ones.

• https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/get-network-clients-bandwidth-usage-history/
• https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/get-network-appliance-connectivity-monitoring-destinations/?
• https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/get-network-wireless-usage-history/
• https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/get-network-clients-bandwidth-usage-history/

My question is, how can I use these endpoints, in order to replicate the data provided in the "Usage over time" found in summary reports (both the "download" and "total" columns found there)? Which endpoints should I use?

Thank you!

[aleabrahao]

There isn't a single Meraki API endpoint that produces the Usage data over time for the Summary Report. I believe the closest thing to what you need would be to manually aggregate multiple endpoints.

[Eddysanoli]

What would you think would be the most sensible to aggregate in order to get the closest to the result?

[aleabrahao]

I'm not an expert in the field, but I believe that combining the access point usage history (AP usageHistory) with the client's usage history seems to me the most accurate and reliable way to obtain information.

[Eddysanoli]

After testing with different combinations of endpoints, I found that using the clients bandwidth usage history, matches almost perfectly with the data coming from the Meraki dashboard. The only interesting aspect is that the data reported appears to be scaled up vertically quite significantly (the magnitude of the bandwidth measurements is way higher than what is expected). Im trying to think of a reason for this, but what's interesting to me is that the uplink bandwidth usage is way lower than the client usage, even though in my mind it would make sense for the uplink usage to be higher most of the time.

Im a bit lost. Dont know what you guys think

[Philip D'Ath]

Any chance it is something like comparing bits/second versus bytes/second or kb/s?

Is it out by a factor of x8 or x10 or x1000?

[Eddysanoli]

I thought it consisted of a fixed amount, so maybe an error from my part, but after testing with about 20 different networks the scaling factor hovers around 0.32. In other words, all of the measurements from the API endpoint need to be reduced by about 70% (multiplied by 0.32) before matching the "real" values found in the dashboard.

Thought I could generate a regression that predicts the value of the scaling factor based on specific parameters or characteristics of the network, but to be honest, I feel like Im over complicating things, and cant think of possible valid parameters

EDIT: Could it be that the dashboard is displaying average bandwidth usage, vs the endpoint showing peak bandwidth usage? The site does mention "total traffic consumption"

[Philip D'Ath]

I think you might need to enable NetFlow, and collect and analyse that aggregate data.

https://documentation.meraki.com/SASE_and_SD-WAN/MX/Operate_and_Maintain/Monitoring_and_Reporting/NetFlow_Overview