Cisco: Meraki [API] PowerPack Release Notes, version 115

Version 115 of the Cisco: Meraki API PowerPack adds a universal credential and guided discovery to the PowerPack, adds support for selective API endpoint collection, and updates multiple Dynamic Applications.

  • Minimum Required SL1 Version: 12.1.0

Before You Install or Upgrade

Ensure that you are running version 12.1.0 or later of SL1 before installing the "Cisco: Meraki [API]" PowerPack.

For details on upgrading SL1, see the relevant SL1 Platform Release Notes.

Installing or Upgrading the PowerPack

If you are upgrading from a version of the Cisco: Meraki [API] PowerPack earlier than version 106, ScienceLogic does not guarantee the success of the upgrade.

Additionally, if you are upgrading directly from the version 107 Limited Availability release, you might need to perform the following steps for collection to work:

  1. Locate the Cisco Meraki physical device and click its bar graph icon ().
  2. On the Device Summary page, click the Events tab.
  3. Locate all the events labeled "Cisco: Meraki Cloud Controller discovered as a component of organization...", select their checkbox(es), and then click the Del button to delete the events.
  4. After the events are deleted, the "Cisco: Meraki Cloud Controller Creation" run book action will run automatically and collection will work.

If you have customized run book action/automation policies or alert policies, enabled or disabled certain Dynamic Applications, modified the Request Manager 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 when Python 2 is deprecated.

To install or upgrade to Version 115 of the "Cisco: Meraki [API]" PowerPack, perform the following steps:

  1. Familiarize yourself with the Known Issues for this release.
  2. If you have not done so already, upgrade your system to the Minimum Required SL1 Version: 12.1.0 or later release.
  1. Download Version 115 of the "Cisco: Meraki [API]" PowerPack from the Support Site to a local computer.
  2. Go to the PowerPack Manager page (System > Manage > PowerPacks). Click the Actions menu and choose Import PowerPack. When prompted, import Version 115 of the "Cisco: Meraki [API]" PowerPack.
  3. After importing the PowerPack, you will be prompted to install the PowerPack. Click the Install button to install the PowerPack.

Version 113.5 of the PowerPack adds a new "encoding" method defined within the "Request Manager" snippet in order to support latin-1 characters in Meraki network and device names. In order to update the names of any devices or networks that already exist with untranslated special characters, uncheck the Preserve Hostname option on each individual device to allow the new encoding fix to update the device or network names.

After installing the PowerPack, you might want to disable the "Data Collection: Async Dynamic App Collection" process prior to discovering your Meraki system. Asynchronous collection can cause slower device discovery. For more information, see the Monitoring Cisco Meraki (API) manual.

After upgrading the PowerPack, you must delete all SNMP Dynamic Applications that were included in previous versions of the PowerPack. These Dynamic Applications will not function correctly with newer versions of the PowerPack, and upgrading the PowerPack will not automatically remove them.

Features

This release includes the following features:

  • Dynamic Applications to discover and monitor Cisco Meraki devices, networks, and organizations
  • Device classes for each type of Meraki component device SL1 monitors
  • Event policies that are triggered when Meraki component devices, networks, and organizations meet certain status criteria
  • SOAP/XML and Basic/Snippet sample credentials for discovering Cisco Meraki devices:
  • Run book action and automation policies that perform the following actions:
  • Create a virtual device that represents a Meraki organization during discovery
  • Vanish devices and child devices
  • Reboot devices
  • Change switch configurations

The PowerPack includes some event policies that can generate events in SL1 based on emails SL1 receives from Cisco Meraki. To enable SL1 to generate these events from email, you must first configure your Meraki devices to send email to SL1 using certain formatting rules. You must then configure SL1 to generate events from the inbound Meraki emails. For instructions, see the Monitoring Cisco Meraki (API) manual.

ScienceLogic recommends configuring webhooks in SL1 and Meraki to receive these alerts if you are using SL1 version 11.2 or later. For more information about webooks, see the Events manual. Contact your client success manager if you have additional questions on how to implement Meraki webhooks.

The email event policies included in the PowerPack each have an expiration delay setting that specifies the amount of time after which an active event is automatically cleared from SL1 if the event has not reoccurred. However, clearing an event for reaching its expiration delay setting does not mean that the initial condition that caused the event has been resolved.

Enhancements and Issues Addressed

The following enhancements and addressed issues are included in this release:

  • Added a universal credential and guided discovery workflow to the PowerPack. The universal credential includes configuration options for SSL certificate verification, proxy configuration, and selective discovery. For more information on configuring a Cisco Meraki universal credential, see the "Creating a Universal Credential for Cisco Meraki" section in the Cisco: Meraki [API] PowerPack manual.

  • Added support for SSL certificate verification to the SOAP/XML and universal credential types.

  • Added support for selective API endpoint collection to the SOAP/XML credential type, which allows you to define specific API endpoints to exclude from collection. For more information on configuring selective API endpoint collection, see the "Creating a SOAP/XML Credential for Cisco Meraki" section in the Cisco: Meraki [API] PowerPack manual.

  • Added new fields to the universal credential type to enable retry override capability:

    • Maximum number of retries

    • Time between retries

These credential headers and fields should only be changed for troubleshooting purposes. Changing these values can cause collections to take longer to run, which could result in missing data or early termination (sigterm).

  • Updated the names of the example credentials in the PowerPack to the following:

    • Cisco: Meraki - API Basic Example

    • Cisco: Meraki - API Example (Selective)

    • Cisco: Meraki - API Proxy Example

    • Cisco: Meraki - API Example

  • Removed the "Discovery" collection object from the "Cisco: Meraki Organization Discovery [API]" Dynamic Application.

  • Added the new "Cisco: Meraki Wireless Stats [API]" Dynamic Application, which allows you to collect information for wireless Cisco Meraki devices.

This Dynamic Application is disabled by default, and must be manually aligned to Cisco Meraki devices. For information about configuring the "Cisco: Meraki Wireless Stats [API]" Dynamic Application, see the Cisco: Meraki [API] manual.

  • Added the new "Cisco: Meraki AP Utilization Performance [API]" Dynamic Application, which you can use to collect information on wireless access point (WAP) type devices.

This Dynamic Application is disabled by default. For information about configuring the "Cisco: Meraki AP Utilization Performance [API]" Dynamic Application, see the Cisco: Meraki [API] manual.

  • Updated the "Cisco: Meraki Device Discovery [API]" Dynamic Application so that a device's MAC address is assigned as the device name instead of its serial number when no name is assigned. If you want to update the name of the device manually, you must disable the "Preserve Hostname" option on the device.

  • Updated the alert formulas for both alerts in the "Cisco: Meraki Uplink Status [API]" Dynamic Application so that alerts and events are only generated when the status changes from "Active/Ready" to "Disabled/Not Connected".

  • Updated the "Cisco: Meraki Uplink Performance [API]" Dynamic Application to index data by destination IP, which addresses issues with multiple IP configurations in Cisco Meraki. As part of the updates, the alert names for the "Cisco: Meraki Uplink Performance [API]" have been updated to reflect accurate conditions and include the specific IP.

  • Added three new collection objects to the "Cisco: Meraki Request Manager [API]" Dynamic Application to display information on skipped endpoints.

  • Added the new "Cisco: Meraki [API] Py3" Execution Environment, which is compatible with Python 3.

ScienceLogic recommends removing the "Cisco: Meraki [API]" execution environment after upgrading to version 115 of the PowerPack.

  • Added logging for the "Cisco: Meraki Org Write [API]" run book action policy and included the run book action status in the "Event Log Action" entry for the run book action policy.

  • Addressed an issue with the "Cisco: Meraki Uplink Usage Performance [API]" Dynamic Application that caused incorrect percentages to display for the "Uplink - Download Utilization Percent" and "Uplink - Upload Utilization Percent" presentation objects. (Case: 00428304)

Known Issues

The following known issues affect version 115 of the "Cisco: Meraki [API]" PowerPack:

  • Calculations for the "Uplink - Download Utilization Percent" and "Uplink - Upload Utilization Percent" presentation objects in the "Cisco: Meraki Uplink Usage Performance [API]" Dynamic Application are incorrect and should be changed to 375 instead of 37500. For more information on updating the calculations, see the Troubleshooting section in the Cisco: Meraki [API] manual.
  • The Meraki API may not always send a "retry header". If this occurs, the PowerPack does not retry the API call, which will result in a gap in data when it occurs. This will be addressed in a future version of the PowerPack.
  • If a Cisco Meraki device name includes a special character, the device name will appear in hexadecimal values on the Device Components page.
  • The Meraki Organization will not be modeled after discovery if the Meraki organization has an apostrophe in its name.
  • Due to a limitation in the number of requests that Meraki can handle per second, data collection gaps might occur when monitoring larger-scale systems.
  • The PowerPack cannot filter out particular organizations during discovery and will discover every organization that the API key returns.