Meraki Power saving

[deepika-n]

As most of the offices do not work on weekends , we performed a (POC) to turn off Wireless Access Points from Friday evening to Monday Morning.

As part of this power saving POC,

1. I would like to know if it is a best practice to turning off the Wireless Access Points every weekend would lead to any Hardware damage / Hardware performance. If so please provide us the documentation regarding it.

2. As of now, in order to collecting the power saving records we are referring it from the Top switches by power usage daily report from the Cisco meraki via mail. If in case the report we can gather directly from Meraki dashboard would be great & guide us through.

[PhilipDAth]

Regular heat cycles will cause greater device wear - but not to an extent I would worry about it.  Take those power savings!

In the top right-hand corner of the summary report, click on the email symbol to schedule the report to be emailed to you.

[Alisdair85]

Hi, sounds like a great initiative and POC you are running, this is a space I have been working in for 3+ years in regards to powering off Meraki APs, Switches and other PoE PD's which has had zero operational impact across the some 10,000+ APs powering off daily. Some of these questions you have are captured in the below FAQ link my team and I have written up from this R&D experience. 

www.thisiscae.com/blog/frequently-asked-questions-about-wiserwatts

With regards to point 2, there is a much better way to report on the energy savings impact than using the 'Top switches by power usage' output, we generate this on a daily basis, example of this output below and which is a free of charge (read-only) API integrated solution on the reporting side. 

Happy to answer any questions you might have as we have been working closely with Meraki PM/Engineering in this space since 2021. Feel free to ping me a message via LinkedIn!

www.linkedin.com/in/ali-mckeand-%F0%9F%9A%80-67b04245/

[van604]

we have been doing this for at least two years now and there is some savings and have not noticed any additional wear and tear on the devices.  The biggest lesson learned is that multiple notifications needs to go out to let people know that the wireless is off on the weekends as there is always that ONE person that never reads it and makes a big issue that they cannot connect on the off hours.

[RicardoD]

Have you checked this document? https://meraki.cisco.com/product-collateral/meraki-ms-sustainability-whitepaper/?file 

You can also use this API Endpoint to the power consumption of a switch port: https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/get-device-switch-ports-statuses/

[Alisdair85]

I would advise caution in using this API endpoint with regards to accuracy, over the last 3+ years of R&D using this endpoint and a few others, there are some energy (power) consumption anomalies, a number were fixed in collaboration with Meraki and my team across 2023 (five fixes deployed to Meraki production), but there are still a number of other corner cases we are working through with Meraki Engineering in regards to the data derived from the "powerUsageInWh" property of this endpoint, at the moment we have built in handling business logic for these exceptions we see on a daily basis 

[sungod]

Yes, we had similar experience starting back in 2020, and a long period working with Meraki support getting resolution.

All endpoints returning 'measured' values need reason checking, it's not unique to Meraki API either.

[deepika-n]

According to 'Get Organization Summary Switch Power History' via API, 

      - That is (getOrganizationsSummarySwitchPowerHistory) method provides a summary of power usage across the org, 

      - But doesn't directly specify which individual switches/ devices the power usage corresponds to.

• To be clear that this API is not providing device level power data.

      - I also tried (dashboard.switch.getDevicesSwitchPortsStatuses) method again not providing device level power data.

• I suspected if any more specific endpoints or configuration changes to be done, that might expose to these data further.

[sungod]

The getDeviceSwitchPortsStatuses call provides power usage (over timespan, default one day) for each port that has PoE enabled, it's the powerUsageInWh value.

This is device level power for an attached device such as an AP.

[Alisdair85]

Hi Deepika, our platform can provide the reporting and data insights you are after and in a simple and easy to view dashboard which also includes handling the anomalies in energy consumption (with the powerUsageInWh property) that we get from the Meraki platform and have been working with over the past 3+ years.

There is also no commercial costs involved for the reporting element of this platform, if this is of interest then happy to run through a demo with you if you email Ali@DevNetApps.io