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Have you been wondering about recent upgrades and contributions to the Cisco Meraki API? This article delivers to you all the latest news and updates from the world of Cisco Meraki APIs.
Cisco Meraki has adopted an API first strategy for many years now, and a lot of focus has been on expanding the number of endpoints available for users to access. The availability of endpoints directly correlates to the potential the APIs have, as they are simply an extension of the dashboard. Being able to touch more parts of the dashboard thus allow the APIs to have more access.
This article is for anyone with an active interest in the Meraki APIs. Whether you’re managing Meraki networks or just have a passion for learning more, you can be sure to find some value here. The article is mainly directed towards folks who are already familiar with the Meraki APIs, because here we’ll be focusing on recent updates and new endpoints.
If you feel like aren’t really comfortable with them as of yet, be sure to check out my free course on How to Get Started With the Cisco Meraki API. The course should equip you with all the foundations you’ll need to know to be able to reap the benefits of API usage.
New endpoints are added rather frequently, and the Meraki Python library is updated regularly to facilitate users. Here we’re going to be taking a closer look at some of the most recent updates Meraki has made to the APIs. This includes: additional endpoints and usability upgrades, as well as some valuable contributions that members of the community have made that could be beneficial to you.
In case you’ve missed new releases, or aren’t sure how to leverage new features, you can always come here to learn more.
Note: We will be updating this article regularly with new updates about the Cisco Meraki API. From new contributions and solutions to the addition of new API endpoints, we’ll be covering all the latest in regards to the Cisco Meraki API. Sign up for our newsletter if you’d like to be the first with all this information!
Most Network Engineers understand how difficult it can be to monitor and administer switch ports across many networks. Switch port profiles are a huge asset, and Meraki has released a new endpoint to be able to obtain the data for each switch port profile within a network.
These endpoints are very thorough and contain all of the important variables such as the port and access settings. This will allow users to find inconsistencies in their switch port profile settings far more easily and enable better auditing practices. Although this is currently a read-only API, we expect Meraki to add APIs very soon for writing to these configurations as well.
Meraki has been making a big push on their MT Sensor products as of late, and they’ve released a whole new set of APIs to create, edit and monitor Sensor Alert profiles.
These endpoints have been in beta for quite some time, and were recently released to the general public. They work in a very similar fashion to the Camera profile endpoints that some users may already be familiar with.
Overall, the Sensor Alert Profile API endpoints allow for much simpler and faster configurations for alert profiles for anyone using the Meraki sensors.
This can avoid a ton of manual configuration and streamline the process of deploying MT Sensors, which is something we expect more and more users to do as sensors become more aligned with the networking suite of products.
You can now use the API to gather a history of all the alerts for a certain network. Do not be confused with the alert settings for a network however, as this is rather for the alerts actually delivered for a network.
For each alert you are able to see the time, the alert and the destination. This allows you to better keep track of alerts, create better accountability and also make reactive monitoring-based solutions, so that you can create different responses based on different types of alerts.
As an example, you may have an MX that is flickering about the bandwidth threshold you’ve set for an alert. This can cause you to have hundreds of alerts for the same thing. Using an endpoint like this new one you can create a script that changes the alert setting based on the data drawn in from this API.
Published on 21st July, 2022.
Cisco Meraki recently launched their all new dashboard. The dashboard has a great new design and a few new features. Unfortunately though the dashboard is still in beta and is therefore optional. Some users also may simply prefer the old dashboard design and not have much use for the new features. Enabling the new dashboard and features also isn’t exactly best practice as these tools are still in beta.
To complement this and make the transition back and forth easier, Meraki has released a suite of APIs to control how organizations opt in and out of early access features.
These can act as a failsafe in case of anything going wrong with the beta dashboard while also enabling you to standardize and control early access settings across all organizations.
You can now use the Meraki API to directly generate an authentication token for your virtual MX appliances.
Although this may seem simple in theory, it opens the door for more interesting vMX applications and enables you to write code that can completely automate the deployment of a new vMX.
Meraki has been steadily improving the API functionality of the MV cameras since their launch, and recently pushed out a whole new set of APIs for Custom Analytics settings for the cameras. This allows you to control your artifacts completely through APIs.
This is not only great for individual users looking to build custom solutions with their cameras, but also allows Meraki’s ecosystem partners to provide better solutions through APIs.
Published 20th March 2022.
Meraki webhooks were released in 2018 to provide much more monitoring capabilities to Meraki customers and service providers. Webhooks are complementary to the Dashboard API as they provide more responsiveness when it comes to alerts.
The Meraki API team has decided to go beyond that and give the developers total control of the webhooks by introducing the webhooks payload templates feature.
You can now create custom payload templates for webhooks to fit the JSON shape, markdown preference and authentication headers that fit your needs. Check out the Webhook documentation.
Published on February 16th, 2022.
It is time to say goodbye to Dashboard API V0!
The first version reached end-of-support last February 5, 2022. The purpose of this shutdown is to reduce the maintenance and support on the multiple code bases, but also reduce support issues as a result of legacy code.
As Dashboard API v0 walks into the sunset, we count on v1 will to take us developers to some exciting new adventures! Find out more here.
Published on February 1st, 2022.
The Meraki API team released several endpoints to handle Adaptive Policy so that developers can list, add, update or delete an active policy leveraging Meraki APIs.
Thanks to Meraki’s Adaptive Policy, networks can recognize users by identity, application and intent in addition to their device’s IP address. Adding this additional layer of security addresses a new reality in cybersecurity.
Published on January 30th, 2022.
The developers at Meraki have added a group of new API endpoints that enables users to draw a variety of summaries for their organizations. The summary endpoints are all under the “top” category. They work uniquely as they deliver the top results for a variety of different categories, such as the top switches, SSIDs, or appliances by usage. This can be a great tool for engineers to find those nodes within their network that could have critically high bandwidth, meaning they could be a great addition alongside other monitoring tools as they allow admins to detect bottlenecks before they become a bigger problem. Using this API also facilitates the creation of reports and allows engineers to deliver concrete data, whether it be to managers or to customers.
This new endpoint is the latest addition to the Meraki library as of October 2021. Previously, Meraki had API endpoints for reading and changing alert settings in regards to networks, but this one is quite different as it deals with dashboard alerts themselves. Instead of having to go to the Meraki dashboard to view any alerts you might have in regards to network health or monitoring, you can now draw in this information from the API, allowing you much greater visibility.
Programmatically being able to get all the alerts from all the networks you are managing opens up great opportunities for automating responses and monitoring. It’s interesting to imagine the kind of things that can be automated with this API now, such as configuration change responses to certain types of alerts.
Although not released officially by Meraki, this has been one of the best recent contributions to the Cisco Meraki API. For any Network Administrator out there trying to use the APIs on a large number of Cisco Meraki networks, this one’s for you.
When doing things at scale, action batches are a great asset and in some cases necessary for speed and efficiency. Action batches allow users to combine multiple API calls into a single batch so that they can be made together and programs can be more streamlined.
Often however, users need to run hundreds of thousands of actions, meaning they need many action batches. This requires writing a lot of code due to the nature of action batches and how they work asynchronously.
The contribution of the Action Batch Helper class has solved this problem, and done much of the heavy lifting for you. Using this along with Action Batches can help large network infrastructures optimize their API use greatly. I would highly recommend joining the Meraki community as a lot of useful contributions are made there. It’s a great place to learn more, get knowledge about best practices, and even help others if you can!
Published on August 31st, 2021.
One of the most important factors to consider when working with the Meraki APIs is the rate limit per Meraki organization. This was previously limited to 5 calls, but was doubled recently to 10 calls per second per organization. For those network managers running large scripts that were encountering 429 errors, this is a game changer. A huge step in the right direction from Meraki, this solves one of the biggest pain points users have had in regards to API use. Although some may claim that this is still not going far enough, it’s worth noting that Meraki is far ahead of their competitors when it comes to API rate limits.
From the capabilities of MV image processing to simply speeding up bulk network changes, the increase in the API call limit is an all around change that will enable programmers to leverage the Meraki API much more.
Published on July 1st, 2021.
One of the most important additions to the API (in my humble opinion) was earlier this year. Managing Meraki firmware versions, especially across different organizations has been extremely problematic. The reality is that not every firmware version is as stable as it should be. This can cause chaos for Network Engineers as they try to handle firmware rollbacks and upgrades.
In some cases I’ve come across engineers who need to have the newest firmware on all their organizations for all their connected platforms to function properly. Having to go through every single organization every few weeks when there was a new version was quite a pain for them, so this API endpoint has been enormously valuable.
That’s because this process can now be completely automated! You can draw in information about firmware availability for a network, and push out schedule times as well as versions you’d like to see devices be upgraded to.
I personally even created a script to help users solve this problem! This script allows you to define a firmware version and upgrade window for all networks in all organizations to upgrade to, simplifying the cumbersome process of having to do this repeatedly.
Published on April 5th, 2021.
Cisco Meraki’s commitment to their APIs is rather commendable. Their API-first strategy is starting to get adoption across the board from other vendors such as MIST, Aruba and Extreme Networks.
Exposing the API so heavily creates a host of opportunities for partners, like ourselves, to build complementary solutions on top of the Meraki dashboard, which in turn nurtures the Cisco Meraki ecosystem and allows users to gain much more value from their networks.
Check out the Meraki Marketplace if you haven’t already to learn more about ecosystem partners and what they bring to the table.
Get a deep understanding of how to automate low-value and redundant network operations using the Meraki APIs.
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