AWCM vs GCM Advantages and DIsadvantages

[DANYBOUFFARD]

Hi,

I was wondering what are de disadvantages and advantages of AWCM vs GCM ?

[LukeDC]

AWCM is your responsibility to keep up and available. Ports need to be opened and accessible via the internet. The normal use case for AWCM over GCM is either you want to control all your data flows or possibly the devices are on a closed network and can't use GCM.

[chengtmskcc]

We are a SaaS customer and rely on AWCM for our Android devices. However, we've been seeing inconsistency when it comes to notification and device check-in. Support recommends strongly FCM (previously known as GCM) to address such an issue.

[BrandonOKC]

I’m battilng that issue now with our Work Managed Androids. Our FW TEAM has been unsuccessful in allowing the communication needed for GCM to function properly. Has your success been better with push notifications for apps and other MDM tasks when using AWCM over google? My main concern is with install of apps. Device isn’t pulling apps until I open playstore app.

Any suggestions on how to resolve this would be much appreciated. I’m in the middle of plan to deploy 600+ work managed Androids.

[chengtmskcc]

Hi Brandon,

I've not seen any issue with app push, but I do see an issue with device checking into the console under AWCM. We may consider switching to FCM later this year.

Tom

[LukeDC]

Here's a tip i got awhile back if you are going to use AWCM over FCM. Change AWCM to use 443 in stead of the default port Airwatch assigns. Why? People connect to all kinds of wifi networks and sometimes, 443 and 80 are all that's open. even home networks might not like anything outside the 443/80 range. Happy Airwatching my friends.

[chengtmskcc]

' Change AWCM to use 443 in stead of the default port Airwatch assigns'  IF you are an on-premises customer.

I do miss tinkering the server from time to time. 🙂

[Stansfield]

My understanding is that putting the AWCM on 443 also requires that it is on it's own server not sharing with device services

[LukeDC]

Yes, it would, but if you are using AWCM instead of FCM, you'd better make sure it's dedicated since it will get a whole lot more use than before.

[TuPham_TelstraB]

AWCM (when set to use port 443) usually doesn't need any firewall exceptions, which does provide some level of comfort when trying to diagnose issues. However, on Android you need to fine tune your device profile settings to achieve equilibrium.

FCM on the othe hand has exclusive low level access to the chipset on Android Systems and has an unrivalled ability to wake up a device in sleep mode. I've done some field tests and GCM/FCM is amazingly reliable at waking up devices. The downside to FCM is that you need to have enabled ports 443, 5228-5230 going outbound to the FCM servers,.

Here are some more tips or considerations:
- if you use the AW Lockdown Launcher then make sure you refine your Hidden App whitelist so that all background tasks that need to run can run.
- Turn all Power saving features off. This includes Wifi setting, Battery Saving, Smart Manager. Power saving features has been known to cause a false AWCM online. 

[AntoineRINIE]

Hi all. Question to Brandon : I have the exact same issue. No way to have GCM/FCM work with our firewall. Switched to AWCM. Much better but Google Play apps don't respond to the console commands. Would you mind sharing your experience ? Thanks.

[DANYBOUFFARD]

In our case we finally got it to work, it was a problem with some .dll that were not updated correctly even after se updated them. The fix was to reapply the update.

[AntoineRINIE]

Thank you Dany. Can you confirm that you had the exact same issue as ours ? => awcm works fine with everything internal (internal apps and messages) but not with google play apps.
We are Saas customers so we could ask our support to have a look. Thank

[BrandonOKC]

Antonie,
After months of troubleshooting I’ve come to the conclusion it’s FW SSL packet inspection service that decrypts the SSL communication to inspect then encrypt. At this point is when Communication failure happens. I was able to confirm this by putting device on our public guest WIFI that doesn’t SSL packet inspect traffic.

Next step for me will be to get FW engineer for exclude all android and AirWatch traffic from SSL packet inspection. Which  was done at one point then after Google updated their push services to FCM and use of ports 5228-5230  

Found good network port requirement article for ports needed to allow Android management on corporate network.

Danny B,
Can you elaborate more on what was reloaded on the AWCM server to fix DLL issue? What version of console?

We are using 1811 on-premise.

[DANYBOUFFARD]

I my case when we updated this dll was not updated properly: AirWatch.Api.BusinessImpd.dll we had an older version of the dll that seemed to not have been updated properly when we updated.

We are On Premiseand our version is 18.11.0.33 (1811).