Get wireless guest client session length

[mtarggart]

I am in need of gathering some information on how long the sessions are for guests connecting to the guest wifi. I'm very surprised that this isn't something that I can easily find. We do not have Cisco Prime and since the users are not authenticating, RADIUS Accounting doesn't help. It seems the best I can find is the first time a device is connected to the network and when it was last seen, but knowing when a device first was connected to the network isn't super helpful to me, in this case.

Any thoughts?

[PhilipDAth]

Check out OrganizationLocation Analytics.  I think that will have the kind of information you are interested in.

[PhilipDAth]

If you have loaded in a floor plan and have 3 APs, you might find Wireless/Location Heatmap interesting as well.

[mtarggart]

That sort of helps. But, I was hoping to be able to break it down to a location level instead of lumping all locations into the same dataset.

I'm trying to better plan out our Guest wireless network for the library system I work for. It's currently set as a /16 network, which is way more than it really should be not to mention one giant L2 broadcast domain. I'm hoping to break this up by branch locations. Most branches can suffice with a /24 and a 2-hour DHCP lease, but one location regularly has programs going on with a lot of public interest.

While I've been able to do some fancy spreadsheet work to get total clients per day at each branch, I don't know how long each client stayed connected or even the average length clients were connected for a given day. I'll likely just need to plan for a /23 or /22 network for that location to err on the side of caution.

[PhilipDAth]

If you need more detailed info, I would parse the event log.  Maybe a filter like:

You'll want to use the API for doing this the best.

[PhilipDAth · Accepted solution]

You can break it down however you like, even do comparisons.

[mtarggart]

Great! I didn't think to look there for more breakdowns. I think that gives more of what I'm looking for. Thanks for your help!

[Sander]

Hmm just a thought: why do you need to do addressing planning of the guest wifi that has no authentication, do you provide any local IP connectivity or they only need to access Internet? Why not simply use Meraki AP NAT mode?

[mtarggart]

Users only need a connection to the internet.

I was originally wanting to split this SSID up into smaller broadcast domains as it is currently one large broadcast domain. This may not be needed now with Layer 2 Isolation enabled on the SSID. (This was not enabled before on the current Guest Wifi SSID.) So, now I'm rethinking the approach. I may leave the Guest Wifi as a large broadcast domain.

From the logs that I've been able to review, we have had as many as 1000 concurrent devices on this SSID across all our library branches (there could potentially be more at certain times of the year), so I'm not sure how many simultaneous users the Meraki DHCP server can handle. Being it is a /8 network, I would assume way more than I need to worry about.

However, I did read in the documentation that roaming between APs could be an issue with TCP-utilized services as the public IP address uses the IP address of the AP the device is connected to, and connections will need to be re-established if the device roams to a different AP. I could see this being a problem with streaming protocols like RTMP. The likelihood of it happening is probably low, but it's still something I'd like to avoid, if possible.