While it is nice that the Meraki MDM app on an iPad is continually sending location data, our fleet of iPad devices' location map is invariably reporting their location by IP (or sometimes IP override) when the device is on our network. The devices are then all reporting out of our central building (our public IP's street address).
Our campus is not huge, but it spans a couple of city blocks; we'd like to see which building it is in via GPS coordinates. How can we get Meraki to display the GPS coordinates reported by a device in Lost Mode instead of the inferred location by IP?
Solved! Go to solution.
We found the solution to our issue by checking the System Manager > Configure > General > Network Locations. As documented, the location we set for our public IP overrode all other methods of displaying the location of the device. Removing the override location allowed the lost device to display its GPS coordinates accurately.
I posit that this is an erroneous feature, as the devices' own GPS location should always take precedence over a calculated location based on IP. As noted in the documentation, IP-based geolocation is the last of the options that should be used to calculate a device's location.
There's 4 different sets of information that Systems Manager uses to infer location:
Some caveats to this:
Okay, so how do we ensure that we get the best information from the device?
The first place to start is by having a look at your ADE (formerly DEP) profile.... Where you can skip steps at setup, did you skip Location? If so, your device won't report GPS. And it's such a pain to turn back on retrospectively. So, if you're skipping Location, consider changing this
Ensure that the SM app is running in the background, and tat Background app refresh is enabled for it. Sadly, there's no way for us to systematically turn this on using Systems Manager: It's just not available to us using Apple's MDM functionality
And, of course, if your using meraki Access Points, ensure that they are in both the same organization as your systems manager instance, and that you've placed them accurately in your dashboard
I do hope that helps...
Paul -- Thanks for the background descriptions.
We found the solution to our issue by checking the System Manager > Configure > General > Network Locations. As documented, the location we set for our public IP overrode all other methods of displaying the location of the device. Removing the override location allowed the lost device to display its GPS coordinates accurately.
I posit that this is an erroneous feature, as the devices' own GPS location should always take precedence over a calculated location based on IP. As noted in the documentation, IP-based geolocation is the last of the options that should be used to calculate a device's location.