Device Address/Location

[Adam]

I feel like we use to have a thread on this but I can't seem to find it.  If I go to Organization>Overview I can tell that I have about 36 devices with no Address/Location set but I have no way to tell which devices those are without manually auditing every device and network.  I have greater than 300 devices across a ton of different networks so it would be quite the ordeal to accomplish this.  I raised a ticket with support and they also couldn't pull a list of those devices for me and suggested the dreaded make a wish feature.  Has anyone found a way around this?

I figure one easy way for Meraki to solve this would be to just let us add a column on our device listing page for Address since it is already a field in the database.  It would still be rather slow but at least I could see it in some batches rather than going through every device individually.  Otherwise just making the pin drop above clickable to see a list would be nice.  Or even a report in Overview of "Non Located Devices" would be great.  Please advise.  

[jdsilva]

I know this isn't the easiest way for everyone, but location can be updated via API. That's really your best option to update en masse.

[Adam]

I wouldn't mind updating them individually if I knew which ones to update.  

[BlakeRichardson]

@Adam I agree things like this shouldn't be difficult considering all of the info is already there......

[RyanB]

Hey Adam,

As mentioned before I think your best bet would be to use API's to accomplish this. 

There is a Bulk Address Changer - created by one of our SE's on our solutions page at https://create.meraki.io/build/dashboard-api-react-toolbox-demo/ 

You could use the demo without even having to host it yourself, by just putting in your API key and running it.

This is only used initially to go set an address for every device in your network. You could technically use this if you wanted to run through every network, and make sure ALL the devices have matching addresses. But it is a network by network basis, and requires you to put in the addresses. 

However if you have a ton of networks (and don't know which need updating) this wouldn't exactly be ideal.

In that case, if it were me, I'd download the source code, and see if you could add a feature to it where one of the checkboxes would make it just cycle through networks and take the address of any device which is already set in that network and copy it to make sure all devices have a matching address. 

Milage may vary depending on your comfort with programming. 

[Adam]

280 or so of my devices have the correct addressing information.  We've just have had 20-30 that have slipped through the cracks over the last couple of years.  So my concern with using that tool is that it would just do a blanket overwrite and mess up my valid addressing.  Is there any way, with the API, to get a list of all the devices where the address is null?  

[Uberseehandel]

@Adam

I don't know very much about the database at the backend. I do know it is a "roll-yer-own" and I have reason to believe that it may not be dissimilar to MongoDB as far as end users are concerned. Which basically means that if we were able to get access to replicated subsets of our own data the speed of development of API functionality would increase.

Health Warning - Radical ideas may be injurious to your health, mental or otherwise. "Rollies" and random clicking on Internet links may have unintended consequences.

[RyanB · Accepted solution]

Sorry for the delayed reply Adam.

I do have a script that cycles through all networks then devices. Technically you could use that to identify any device without an address set and/or with the default lat/long and then just report those devices/networks into an excel spreadsheet for you to manually fix. It would take the script some time to run, but it churning through is still better than you doing it in dashboard.

PM me, and I'll try to modify the script to do that for you tonight and walk you through how to run it on your org.

[RyanB]

Alright so heres the results of the simple script, just need to put your API key in it with the organization ID. 

PM me for the script. 

[Adam]

@RyanB's script did the trick on this.  Hopefully we'll see something more integrated in the future. 

[Podah]

Hi,

@RyanB 

This is exactly what I'm looking for to. Can you share the script for me to? It would be awesome.

[Waheed-Ali]

Hi RyanB,

I also wanted the same. I want to get a list of all the devices, where I can check which devices are missing for "Address" field. Can you help me get/run that script on my network or share the script?

[armagh1]

Hi Ryan the link provided does not take me directly to the Bulk address changer could you provide the current on I could not find it browsing the site

Thanks