At the heart and soul of our networks are network application monitoring tools (e.g. Cisco Prime, SecureNow AlertLogic, WhatsUp Gold). They provide 3rd party, independent assessments of the state of our networks. Over the years, these kind of tools have grown past the simple task of indicating whether something is up or down. Now, we want to know, if up, how much traffic is it passing? Does it have the resources needed to sustain it? And much more. With the proliferation of Internet connectivity, the adoption of standards, and the landscape of vendors becoming ever so crowded, we have learned that maintaining a healthy network is not an easy task. We need to be able to scale and automate ourselves through the programmability of networks.
Long gone are the days of just knowing what the standards are and how to setup a device. Now, the network has evolved to become a tool of the business. Out of the need to scale and the pressure to maintain networks under budgetary constraints and with limited personal, automating network tasks are on the horizon. APIs are the right tools to aid us down the path of network automation. If you own a network application monitor tool, make sure it supports REST API calls. If so, you can leverage the investment already made and tie Cisco Meraki’s Dashboard into it. Let's consider the following simple workflow example on collecting data analytics that could be integrated into your monitoring application:
- API call 1: Obtain Organization ID.
https://dashboard.meraki.com/api/v0/organizations
- API call 2: List Network IDs for the Organization. https://dashboard.meraki.com/api/v0/organizations/[organizationId]/networks
- API call 3: Collect traffic analytics data.
https://dashboard.meraki.com/api/v0/networks/[id]/traffic?timespan=7200
The end result can be observed below:
Sample returned output.
Cisco Meraki API calls permit Dashboard to become part of your daily workflow to setup, maintain, and optimize your networks from within the monitoring tools you are already leveraging. Share with the community what monitoring applications you are using, how you are making it part of your daily workflow, and contribute any code others would use. Visit http://developers.meraki.com to get started today!