Configuration backup safety net

[RobinsonRoca]

Admittedly I am a Meraki fan, but I am also let down by them often.  Meraki needs a way to restore configurations to last known good, or to complelty restore a config after a catastrophic mistake. For example, if a user deletes a stack (by accident), all the layer 3 configurations are lost. There is no easy way to restore it. Unless of course you are an API expert and have your config saved in API format.  Other than that it's a manual process. With a Cisco catalyst I can take a backup of a config to restore in case something goes wrong, Nexus has a roll back feature. Why is there no such option on a Hardware as a service platform like Meraki?  There should be a break in case of emergency or Undo button.

I know what everyone is going to say, if you make a mistake you're going to lose access to the dashboard, and in some cases that could be true, in others its not.  In my example above you would not lose access to the dashboard because the management (control plane) of the switches (if following best practice) is getting their network access through a Layer 2 Trunk to the firewall and the firewall is providing an IP to the switches. So although I lose the Layer 3 config of the stack, the switches would still be reachable.

[RobinsonRoca]

OH, and before you ask, yes, I "made a wish / provided feedback"

[Jwiley78]

Yes, I agree with you on this one.  We had to move devices to different organization.  The only way we could back up config was numerous screenshots.

[BlakeRichardson]

@RobinsonRoca I get where you are coming from and yes this would be a nice feature. 

Alkthough if you have staff accidentally deleting stacks I would be sitting down with them having a stern word that they need to be paying attention to what they are doing, yes we all make mistakes but often they are made because people are not paying attention or in a rush. 

[RobinsonRoca]

True, but keep in mind, it is not always an IT professional at the wheels. Implementation engineers drop, set and forget. When a customer accidentally makes a change, and there is no parachute for them, their accident becomes a bigger outage. All we're talking about is a simple revert option, something that maybe triggers the local switch(es) to revert it's config to get back online.  Honestly, this concept is rudimentary, and almost surprises me that it doesn't exist already.

[BlakeRichardson]

I agree that this should be a feature already, I am not disagreeing with you on that. 

[ww]

That would be great.

However for now i would still get started  with something like postman  https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/build/meraki-postman-collection-getting-started/

Things like firewall rules and layer 3 configurations are easy to get and put back

[RobinsonRoca]

Right, for people like you and I, but MSPs sell Meraki on the Basis of "Ease of Use", when you point a customer at APIs to make backups and restores, the pretty "ease of use" shine starts to get dull.

 Meraki needs to add this, so those ease of use customers have an easy fall back for basic changes, and of course the customer can reach out to the MSP for bigger more complex rollbacks.