Cisco Meraki Guide
Meraki MS switches come in multiple flavors and form factors. Meraki switches support 10/100/1000/10000 ports, as well as Cisco’s mGig technology for 2.5/5/10Gbps copper connectivity. 8, 24, and 48 port flavors are available with PoE (802.3af/802.3at/UPoE) available on many models.
Meraki’s MX firewalls support full layer 3-7 deep packet inspection. MX firewalls are compatible with a variety of VPN technologies including IPSec, SSL VPN, and Meraki’s easy-to-use AutoVPN.
MR access points are enterprise class, high performance, access points for the enterprise. MR access points have MIMO technology and integrated beamforming built-in for high performance applications. BLE allows for advanced location applications to be developed with no on-premises analytics platforms.
Using the Meraki modules
Meraki modules provide a user-friendly interface to manage your Meraki environment using Ansible. For example, details about SNMP settings for a particular organization can be discovered using the module meraki_snmp <meraki_snmp_module>.
All Ansible Meraki modules support the following parameters which affect communication with the Meraki Dashboard API. Most of these should only be used by Meraki developers and not the general public.
These are the common parameters which are used for most every module.
- org_name
- Name of organization to perform actions in.
- org_id
- ID of organization to perform actions in.
- net_name
- Name of network to perform actions in.
- net_id
- ID of network to perform actions in.
- state
- General specification of what action to take.
query
does lookups.present
creates or edits.absent
deletes.
Hint
Use the and net_id
parameters when possible. org_name
and net_name
require additional behind-the-scenes API calls to learn the ID values. org_id
and will perform faster.
Meraki Authentication
The “Vault” feature of Ansible allows you to keep sensitive data such as passwords or keys in encrypted files, rather than as plain text in your playbooks or roles. These vault files can then be distributed or placed in source control. See Using Vault in playbooks for more information.
Meraki’s API returns a 404 error if the API key is not correct. It does not provide any specific error saying the key is incorrect. If you receive a 404 error, check the API key first.
Meraki and its related Ansible modules return most information in the form of a list. For example, this is returned information by meraki_admin
querying administrators. It returns a list even though there’s only one.
Handling Returned Data
Since Meraki’s response data uses lists instead of properly keyed dictionaries for responses, certain strategies should be used when querying data for particular information. For many situations, use the selectattr()
Jinja2 function.
Meraki’s API returns a 404 error if the API key is not correct. It does not provide any specific error saying the key is incorrect. If you receive a 404 error, check the API key first. 404 errors can also occur if improper object IDs (ex. ) are specified.