Questions about Dashboard API, 'Get Network Clients' and 'Get Network Traffic'

[Namgyu]

1-1) Do you know why the smallest timespan of 'Get Network Clients' is 300 sec, and of 'Get Network Traffic' is 7200 sec?

* Get Network Clients: GET /networks/{networkId}/clients

* Get Network Traffic: GET /networks/{networkId}/traffic

1-2) And when I make codes to get data of total usage of clients and traffic, I get different usage updated per 1 minutes in 'Get Network Clients' using timespan=300 but I get same usage updated per 5~10 minutes in 'Get Network Traffic' using timespan=7200.

Why is the usage of 'Get Network Traffic' not updated as fast as possible?

2) In 'Get Network Clients', the number of clients suddenly decreases although employees work they always do.

Please see the image I attached. Anybody knows why this situation often occurs?

3) In Alert menu, Does the configuration of threshold mean total usage of all clients in the network? I'm not sure.

[PhilipDAth · Accepted solution]

The data is aggregated, not real time.

[Namgyu]

Thank you @PhilipDAth for answering to my question.

You mean that the data is gathered for some periods and shown by API as not real time?

I also saw a client disconnected at 5pm but it was officially cut off in Meraki dashboard around 7pm.

Is this situation related to your answer?

[PhilipDAth]

>You mean that the data is gathered for some periods and shown by API as not real time?

Correct.  Is aggregated data for the period of time selected.

[Namgyu]

For example, when I send API GET /networks/{networkId}/clients as setting timespan=300 at 9:00, is the data I get gathered from 8:55 to 9:00?

[klausengelmann]

Hello Namgyu.

I have the same problem you described in your post.

I am collecting the number of clients associated per Meraki Access Point or Network using the following URL:

https://api.meraki.com/api/v0/networks/MY_NETWORK/clients?perPage=1000&timespan=3600

In order to avoid the API Rate Limit I am collecting the result every hour using PRTG.

The timespan used inside the URL is also 3600 seconds (1 hour).

The problem is that the data is coming in a very inconsistent way. 

Please, could you help me to understand how can I use the Meraki API timespan correctly ?

What is the recommended time interval to collect the connected clients ?

Regards,