WAAS Services API

johng231 · ‎08-26-2009

Hello Everyone,

I'm sure I'm not the only one out there when I say this; the central manager's reporting on how much bandwidth you're saving is pretty much useless! Has anyone tried to print out the reports or even saved it to a PDF without the colors changing and the letters getting squeezed together? And yes I'm using the latest and supposedly improved version 4.1.3a for these reports and graphs. How can you show your boss and your boss's boss the ROI when you can't even read the reports correctly? Having two separate graphs that shows original and optimized traffic is useless. It would be ideally better to represent this as one graph without showing the pass-through traffic at all, because we don't care about pass-through stats only original and optimized!

The next thing is to try to figure out how the WAAS API services works, since you can't pull those magic numbers from the WAE device. Has anyone successfully used the API to generate the graphs that show bandwidth savings on an external web server using something like CACTI? If so, I would greatly appreciate it if someone can send me an example script to get started.

bberry · ‎08-31-2009

I have something along the same lines. We have just started a WAAS demo and reporting does seem to be a bit confusing. It looks as though there is no way to have a historical report on past days within a specific time frame.

I am wondering how I can report on a test we want to run from say 7:00 pm at night till 3:00am the next morning and see only that traffic. Is there something we are missing as well? Also when I look as say just our e-mail traffic everything comes out as basically a rectangle in the reports. There are no peeks or valleys in the data.

johng231 · ‎09-04-2009

Hello,

Yes the reporting is a bit confusing. Make sure you're running the latest code 4.1.3a, it has some improved graphs. You can not specify a time range, the lowest is 1 hour it will go back.

I would recommend looking into adding the Cisco WAAS Network Analysis Module (NAM) Virtual Blade blade. This will give you exactly what you're looking for when piloting the WAAS. You can download it and try it out for free for 60 days.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/netmgtsw/ps5740/ps10506/data_sheet_c78-551903.html

bberry · ‎09-08-2009

Thanks for the response. I will look into the NAM Virtual Blade. One other thing we have noticed is that we cannot get historical stats similar to the live stats. i.e. looking at yesterday's conversation between a given time frame. We are trying to see if different systems operations are handled differently by the WAAS but given the fact that it all uses the same port, it is all a summarization of the previous day's traffic. The only way we can tell if say letting the WAAS do full optimization compared to our system compressing the file before transfer is to watch the live conversations. This is making evaluation tough.

Brent