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If you have a Meraki environment, you might me missing an automated report to be sent to you so you can see the general state of your network – and have an easy alert to issues that might be happening. We have the answer – in this blog we’ll run through how our Automating Meraki tool can help.
As a network administrator you tend not to like surprises on your network – keeping things running smoothly is your key aim. Our reporting tool is about giving you regular updates, so you know everything that's happening on your network.
Our Automating Meraki tool lets you receive regular snapshot updates from your network, so you can quickly identify any changes – and take early action.
In the following sections, we’ll run though some of the reporting points – but there are many more in our system, and best of all, as developer we can add in more if you need!
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What is Automating Meraki
Automating Meraki is a tool we have developed to help network administrators manage and maintain their networks. There's a gap in the market for providing some extra functionality to the Meraki GUI and with the Automating Meraki toolset we aim to make your life easier.
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Connecting to your Meraki instance is simple – it’s just via the API and so Automating Meraki is very quickly enabled.
From there you login to the Automating Meraki GUI and you can setup your reporting and other functions as part of the toolset.
The Meraki GUI has many features, but we have added a collection of additional ones in our tool and the Meraki Reporting is one of these tools – let’s take a look!
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Meraki Reporting: Network Overview
To kick off with, the report shows an overview of your network. This is in an easy red / amber / green format to quickly show you what to focus on.
The screen shot below shows how this looks for our lab network in Brisbane:
Meraki Reporting: Overview of the Network Status
In high level you can immediately see across multiple networks where any issues might lie and then if you wanted to, you can login to see what these issues are (the report does provide more detail, but if you need to investigate, the Meraki GUI is where you need to go next).
We'll drill down into some of these alerts in the next section.
In the device dashboard screen, we can take a look at the overall breakdown of your network. This is just general information, but if you notice a sudden increase or decrease in devices, you’ll want to take a look:
Meraki Reporting: Overview of the Network Devices
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Meraki Reporting: Network Alerts
Now, on to the important things – what issues are present on your network.
The image below shows the number of alerts, how critical these are – and importantly when these are occurring. These are easily categorised, so you can see the important alerts easily.
If you can see a sudden increase in the number of alerts, that’s a pretty good sign you need to take action!
The image below shows an example of how the network alerts section in the report provides a great overview of issues occurring:
Meraki Reporting: Overview of the Network Alerts
In addition, the report also shows the cleared alerts, so you’re able to track your progress to resolving any issues on your network:
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Meraki Configuration Changes
In most networks you probably make a few minor changes here and there but would typically be fully aware when new hardware is added.
That said, if you have a team of people working on your network, you also want to keep track of what has actually been changed – especially if human error could be at play.
If you have a mature change control process, you’ll be able to match these changes to expected change controls – if not, it’s time to investigate.
Our report can also provide specific details on what was changed – if you have a large network this could produce a long report though, if you are making a lot of changes:
Meraki Reporting: Configuration Changes over last 7 Days
There could be a lot of configuration changes in a network, so the report can get quite long - but you will at least have a confirmed record of what has changed on your network in case you need to refer to it in the future.
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Meraki Firmware Management
Some things don’t change that often, firmware being one of these.
Meraki can be configured to automatically update its firmware on a pre-agreed schedule, but if your business needs to know when this will occur, you can prevent this happening until you manually schedule it.
Either way – knowing when firmware is out of date and needs to be upgraded means you can get the latest bug fixes and patches in place as soon as possible.
The report image below shows if any of your devices have out of date firmware – a nice bit of peace of mind for you:
Meraki Reporting: Ensure your Firmware is up to Date
Staying on top of having the right firmware is a fairly small thing if kept up to date - but leaving firmware updates can leave you exposed with security issues.
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Meraki Licensing
Like many network device manufacturers, Meraki uses term-based licences, so keeping on top of expiry dates is important.
As you can see from the image below, in our lab we have a range of devices in different stages – this allows us to drill into what these devices do and determine which to upgrade, or if a device has reached the end of its life, allow it to expire.
Missing a licence upgrade can be a real issue, to including this in our report just keeps this front of mind and ensures that you never miss an upgrade:
Meraki Reporting: Critical Reporting - Licence Expiry
With the Meraki reports being sent to you on a schedule, you'll never miss a licence upgrade again - and get plenty of warning too!
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Meraki Reporting: Summary
The role of network administrator is one of constant vigilance, but you never want to get caught out by an ).jpg?width=192&height=240&name=Copy%20of%20Meraki%20Automation%20%20(Instagram%20Post%20(45)).jpg)
issue you could have easily resolved early.
Our Meraki Reporting allows you to get these regular schedule reports for the things that matter to you.
The report includes analysis, as you can see from the images above, so if you’re time poor and don’t have time to wade through a lot of reporting, we have designed the report to be super quick to read and very easy for you to identify the points you need to focus on.
The Automating Meraki tool includes a range of functions, of which the Meraki Reporting function is only one, so if you’re a network admin take a look at the other features that might be useful for you:
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If you're interested to hear more about how to sign up for the tool, contact us here.
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