Action Batches

[jdsilva]

I didn't see this posted yet... 

I sat through a #CLUS session yesterday with @TonyC and Shay Cheng (Is he on here?) and they announced the new Action Batches feature in the Dashboard API. 

https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api/#/rest/guides/action-batches/

This is super cool stuff and will dramatically reduce the time needed for large configuration jobs against the API. I'm looking forward to testing this out next week after I'm home again.

[PhilipDAth]

It was talked about a little earlier this year but I hadn't seen any hard evidence till your post with the reference documentation.  I agree, it will spee dup provisioning a lot.

https://community.meraki.com/t5/Solutions-APIs/API-Webinair-May-2/m-p/46333?advanced=false&collapse_...

[Nash]

I'm pretty jazzed about this. Shay Cheng is the whole reason I got into the Dashboard API (saw him at CLUS last year)!

I'm going to have to learn how to put this to use, since I'm trying to get us to do more programmatic deployments instead of clicky... clicky... oh clicky... when we've got a set of basic settings we use for everything.

[chengineer]

Hi team, sorry this was missed! We should have a blog post published on action batches in the next few days, and in the meantime, you can try running the demo from Cisco Live two weeks ago with the source code posted here. By the way, I'm super flattered @Nash!

[jdsilva]

I got your back @chengineer. I already blogged about it. Twice 😉

[chengineer]

Nice and thank you @jdsilva! Also, that's pretty neat hack with Chromecast bypassing the Google Home app! 😛

[Nash]

@chengineer You were pretty persuasive. Watching one of your presentations genuinely altered the course of my career. I'd already taken a good chunk of programming classes, and used four or five languages... But I was setup to be a normal rack-and-stack CLI for days engineer, like the senior network engineers at my company.

I went home, spent a few weeks asking the Stack Overflows "how to do X in Python". Now I'm the local advocate for as much automation as we can create or effectively and affordably implement via a vendor solution.

Which reminds me that I need to go finish re-writing a script for elegantly pulling CDP/LLDP info from MX. Hopefully that's my morning!

[jdsilva]

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@Nash wrote:

Which reminds me that I need to go finish re-writing a script for elegantly pulling CDP/LLDP info from MX. Hopefully that's my morning!

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Getting off topic now... But I'd be interested to see how you do this. I have my own script for doing this, but it relies on a DB that I maintain and isn't standalone. I ran into problems as I wanted a script where I could just give it a serial and it would return neighbours. My problem is that it needs a network ID as well, and figuring out which network a serial is in is not a trivial activity in our dashboard. I use my DB to look up the network a serial is in, and then send the request to Dashboard for the neighbours. 

[chengineer]

There are a few org-wide device calls (1, 2, and 3) that may be helpful in getting network IDs for all devices? The first will require pagination if you have more than 1000 devices, but the latter two do not.

Also, the blogpost just went live! https://meraki.cisco.com/blog/2019/06/action-batches-a-recipe-for-success/

[jdsilva]

Yup, and I'm using the GetOrgInventory call to populate my DB, but we have a rather large number of Orgs so it takes a while to locate a device. Too long for an interactive script.

[chengineer]

Ah OK, so across multiple orgs. Maybe asynchronous workflows with multithreading could help, but of course that does add extra complexity.

[bayet]

Hello Chengineer,

Could you explain to me how to get the data on the CSV file in postman when using action batches. Without action bacthes, I could make use of runner in postman to import all the variable data needed for the API calls.

Thanks in advance