Hostname / DNS Names not showing

[BlakeRichardson]

As the above image shows only some of my devices are showing a hostname/DNS name. The ones that are are setup in the DNS as they are NAS units which are used by a large number of staff.

Am I missing something? 

[PhilipDAth]

It will be interesting to get some feedback from @MerakiDave.  Normally the system sniffs DHCP, NetBIOS and Bonjour traffic for device names.  I don't believe it uses or sniffs DNS.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Monitoring_and_Reporting/Rename_a_Client_Hostname

[PhilipDAth]

I think it would make sense to also sniff DNS dynamic registration packets.

[BlakeRichardson]

DNS would be a handy option as a lot of network gear is configured with static IP's and doesn't have a netbios or bonjour name. Although I am not sure why its not picking up the names of our NAS devices....

[MilesMeraki]

Is this on an MR network or MX? If MX, what do you have the traffic analysis setting set to under, network-wide> general traffic analysis?

Looks like you can also enable "hostname" analysis for MR only networks via the same route.

[BlakeRichardson]

Its a MS and MX network, traffic analysis is set to detailed. 

[MilesMeraki]

Interesting, I'd be keen to hear what others have to say, I'm clueless.

[Oderbang]

Why sniff them? why cant we just add our internal DNS server and have the meraki do a revers IP lookup ?

what we do manually when trying to identify an IP good old "Ping -a <IP>"

[PhilipDAth]

What about when there is no internal DNS?  What about if it is a non-Windows environment?  What about devices that can't register in internal DNS (printers, cameras, scanners, etc)?

[MRCUR]

Are you tracking clients by MAC or IP on the MX? 

My primary MX network is set to track by IP as there are L3 devices downstream and generally all I see are IP's in the client list. On my MR networks (which are downstream of the MX), these show hostnames properly. 

[BlakeRichardson]

Its set to use MAC as a lot of devices on our network use DHCP and I wasn't sure how well this would work with IP.

[MRCUR]

Meraki's guidance is to use MAC tracking if there is L2 connectivity between the clients and the MX, otherwise IP tracking should be used. It's not related to DHCP. I don't think this is related to your hostname issue, unless you do have L3 devices downstream from the MX and MAC tracking is not working properly because of this. 

[MerakiDave]

Hey folks, sorry late to the thread, @MRCUR is correct, that setting is really for when you have L2 versus L3 connectivity downstream.  That said I don't have an answer at the moment, have you bounced it off Support yet to take a look?

[BrothersTM]

I'm late to this conversation, but over the summer I upgraded our 2008 R2 domain controllers to 2019.  Since then, in dashboard the detailed hostnames do not show up any longer.  All device hostnames showed up prior.  I have my network in dashboard configured to collected detailed info, but the hostname visibility option is no longer there as stated in some documentation...which I guess is dated at this point.  Is this an issue within dashboard or in the 2019 DC upgrade?