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What is Cisco Meraki?
Cisco Meraki provides a set of networking devices and appliances that you can manage from the cloud. Cisco Meraki's centralized cloud architecture enables you to securely monitor users, applications, and devices in your environment.
What Does the Cisco: Meraki [API] PowerPack Monitor?
To monitor Cisco Meraki devices using SL1 and the Meraki API, you must install the "Cisco: Meraki [API]" PowerPack. This PowerPack enables you to discover and collect data about Cisco Meraki appliances.
The "Cisco: Meraki [API]" PowerPack includes:
- Dynamic Applications to discover, model, and monitor performance metrics and collect configuration data for Cisco Meraki devices
- Device classes for each of the Cisco Meraki devices, networks, and organizations that SL1 monitors
- Event policies and corresponding alerts that are triggered when Cisco Meraki devices meet certain status criteria
- Event policies for email/webhook alerts
- Example credentials that you can use as template to create Basic/Snippet or SOAP/XML credentials for connecting to the Cisco Meraki API
- A universal credential that you can use to run a guided discovery of Cisco Meraki services
- Run book action and automation policies that create Meraki organization virtual devices during discovery, reboot devices, and vanish devices
Meraki dashboards can be downloaded in the "Cisco Meraki: SL1 Dashboards" PowerPack.
Best Practices for Monitoring Meraki with SL1
Cisco Meraki differs from other solutions and is focused on abstraction of complexities and ease of use. As a result, Meraki devices do not expose the same level of data as typical network technologies. Because of this, expectations of data reported and methods of monitoring must differ from other technologies that cater to "power users".
The "Cisco: Meraki [API]" PowerPack is expected to be used in conjunction with email or webhook ingestion of alerts from the Meraki dashboard into SL1. ScienceLogic's API integration collection purposely does not replicate data collection for metrics that exist as an alarm in the Meraki dashboard to avoid "wasting" the set amount of API calls SL1 can make to the Meraki dashboard API within the API rate limit. For more information, see the sections on configuring inbound alerts from Meraki via email or webhooks. See the "Alerts and Notifications" section of the Cisco Meraki documentation to view all of the alerts possible in the Meraki dashboard.
The Cisco Meraki API rate limit is determined by how many API calls are made for a Cisco Meraki organization, regardless of the user, API key, or IP address making the API call. As a result, ScienceLogic does not recommend using multiple SL1 systems to monitor a single Cisco Meraki organization, or using any other tools that utilize the Cisco Meraki API for the same organization at the same time.
Meraki does not expose much, if any, of the typical performance data you might expect in any of the bulk API calls offered. This data is not intended to be used for monitoring and is designed to only be fetched on a per-device, as-needed basis. The integration does include some of this data collection, but the Dynamic Applications that do so are turned off by default and/or not aligned to devices in order to avoid taxing the API rate limit for large customers with other tools also using the Meraki API.
Additionally, Meraki does not expose CPU, memory, swap, or other typical "vital" metrics as you would expect with other networking gear and therefore, SL1 does not collect it. You can attempt to monitor Meraki devices via SNMP with an IP-based discovery, but the management information bases (MIB) on Meraki devices are very limited and not much data will be collected. ScienceLogic does not recommend discovering Meraki devices via IP address and merging them with the API-based components in this PowerPack, because Meraki requires DHCP to be enabled, and collection issues will occur if IP addresses are reassigned after merging the devices.
Some Dynamic Applications might align to devices that you do not expect data to be collected for as a method of future-proofing the integration in case the API is updated to respond with data for those devices. This is done only when the API call required to collect the data can be done for all devices in a Meraki organization at once, and it's "free" to align it to all devices.
Installing the Cisco: Meraki [API] PowerPack
Before completing the steps in this
If you have customized run book action/automation policies or alert policies, enabled or disabled certain Dynamic Applications, modified the "Cisco: Meraki Request Manager [API]" Dynamic Application snippet to configure API calls, or made similar changes in the "Cisco: Meraki [API]" PowerPack, ScienceLogic recommends backing up these changes prior to upgrading to version 114 or later. After upgrading, you can reimplement the backed up changes. If you continue to use duplicated or customized versions of the items mentioned above and do not upgrade to versions using Python 3, you will experience issues in SL1 12.5.0 and later, where Python 2 support is deprecated.
By default, installing a new version of a PowerPack overwrites all content from a previous version of that PowerPack that has already been installed on the target system. You can use the Enable Selective PowerPack Field Protection setting in the Behavior Settings page (System > Settings > Behavior) to prevent new PowerPacks from overwriting local changes for some commonly customized fields. For more information, see the section on Global Settings.
For details on upgrading SL1, see the relevant SL1 Platform Release Notes.
To download and install the PowerPack:
- Search for and download the PowerPack from the PowerPacks page (Product Downloads > PowerPacks & SyncPacks) at the ScienceLogic Support Site.
- In SL1, go to the PowerPacks page (System > Manage > PowerPacks).
- Click the button and choose Import PowerPack. The Import PowerPack dialog box appears.
- Click [Browse] and navigate to the PowerPack file from step 1.
- Select the PowerPack file and click . The PowerPack Installer modal displays a list of the PowerPack contents.
- Click . The PowerPack is added to the PowerPacks page.
If you exit the PowerPack Installer modal without installing the imported PowerPack, the imported PowerPack will not appear in the PowerPacks page. However, the imported PowerPack will appear in the Imported PowerPacks modal. This page appears when you click the menu and select Install PowerPack.