This is more a conceptual discussion/question. How to build automated process to update the network with standard configuration? Lets say there are 100s of networks with variety of configurations. Want to build a process which can be run repeatedly to keep them in sync.    Option#1: One of the solutions can be using Meraki templates, but there are bunch of config items which are not be standard/identical, example vlans, traffic shaping rules and so on   Option#2: using individual APIs with PUT/POST/GET/DELETE operations to either create/update/delete resource. This option will take longer time for processing, for example I have a 2 networks one 5 vlans and the other with 4. Planning to update DHCP lease time on one if the VLANS in addition to create the 5th VLAN on second network. To achieve this, first GET vlans for each network (2 API calls), then check if all networks are available or then do POST operation on that specific network (1 API call). Then use PUT operation to change the lease time for vlan on each network (2 API call). So, on a whole for a simple usecase we need 5 API calls. Think of doing a deployment which involved more objects like traffic shaping, firewall rules, wireless profiles and ssids, this can become a big mess and time consuming when doing at a scale of 1000 networks.   Option#3: Using action batches, this would have a nice option but there are some pit falls using it with resources like VLANs. For example, for the same example discussed above, using action batches whole process will fail because the VLAN trying to create on network 2 already exists on network 1. So we need to make sure we add only actions that will go through if not whole batch will fail.   With these limitation struggling understand the best option to build a workflow that can be used to manage networks with a standard configuration in one place and mitigate and drift in configuration. ... View more

When a network is created I see there is an option to select the network type (example options are "Security appliance", "Switch", "Wireless"). This option seems to drive on what APIs are available for the network, for example, wireless API does not work against a network created with type as "Security appliance" and below is the error.   "errors": [ "This endpoint only supports wireless networks" ]   I have a use case to rollout wireless config to network before the device is claimed and added to the network, but being this network with type as appliance wireless APIs are not working and network update API does not have option append the network type.   Any suggestions? ... View more

It seems Action Batches are supported for monitoring APIs such as /appliance/uplink/statuses, /devices/uplinksLossAndLatency. Is my understanding true?   Monitoring APIs tend to be more frequent and can hit API limit, trying to see if I can leverage action batches to create a batch with monitoring all interested monitoring API end points. Any suggestions here? ... View more

I am working on a basic design approach to achieve network automation. Basically we have use-cases to push configurations to various remote network devices, what will be the approach to devise these automatons.   The high-level requirement is to capture the network config, target network devices in JSON, and then run a script to update.   My thought is to use a Continous Integration tool to kick off the automation which in turn spins a python docker container, pull git repo with the config, execute a python script to parse JSON, and invoke Meraki Dashboard APIs.   Please shed light here with comments and suggestions, would be great if you can mention the tools you are using as well.   ... View more