MR36 - Lots of Traffic to/from Meraki Infrastructure?

[lloydz]

We recently upgraded our MR36 fleet to firmware version 30.5.  I don't know if it's coincidental, a result of the upgrade, or if it's always been like this and I just now noticed it, but the APs have gotten "chatty" with communicating with Meraki infrastructure, to the tune that traffic to Meraki sites is now our 4th highest bandwidth utilization according to our content filter (we have over 1,000 MR36's deployed across our network).

It seems to be in bursts, but traffic will average 500MB - 1GB per day per AP, with most traffic going to usw.nt.meraki.com and use.nt.meraki.com.  There is more upload traffic than download, around a 2-1 ratio.

Has anyone else noticed this?  Is this normal?

[DarrenOC]

Interesting. Does this behaviour remain if you roll the firmware back?  What types of traffic are you seeing?

[lloydz]

I have not tried a rollback yet. The traffic is https over port 443 to those two URLs mentioned above.

[mlefebvre]

Looking around in some of my networks and so far this appears normal for an AP on MR30.5

[lloydz]

Interesting - I'm glad to hear it's not just me.  Do you notice it on any APs with prior firmware?  That amount daily certainly seems excessive.

[mlefebvre]

It certainly does stand out in comparison to prior firmware, looking at about 80 access points on MR29.5.1 they have collectively used less than 3.5gb of traffic in the last day to those destinations, with the highest AP at about 150mb. 

[cmr]

I looked at one of our sites with 30.5.1 and...

CW9166 - 1.3GB

MR42/52 - 600MB

MR32 - 40MB

Obviously the last is running 26.8.3...

[lloydz]

Definitely a large difference!