Documentation forHybrid Cloud Observability Essentialsand Network Performance Monitor

Monitor Meraki wireless infrastructure in NPM

Add Meraki organizations to NPM as external nodes, poll information from the cloud and display polled data in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

To monitor SD-WAN devices for Meraki orchestrators, consider upgrading to Hybrid Cloud Observability. See Monitor SD-WAN for Meraki organizations with Hybrid Cloud Observability.

What does NPM monitor for Meraki infrastructure?

Meraki infrastructure provides centralized management of end devices, such as wireless devices, switches, or security appliances, as a cloud service. Physical devices act as thin Access Points (APs), managed by the cloud system. Physical devices are installed at physical locations and assigned to customers.

In NPM, Meraki objects are mapped to wireless entities.

Meraki Model How do you see Meraki objects in Orion?
Organization Controller
Access Point Thin Access Point
Client Client

Unsupported metrics

  • SSID information: NPM does not support displaying SSID information for Meraki devices. This field is empty in widgets and reports.
  • Response time and packet loss: NPM does not poll response time and packet loss for Meraki infrastructure. Any metrics shown for response time and packet loss are polled from the cloud and not from the node. In the cloud, a load balancer selects the node used for the traffic, so the values might be polled on different nodes for each poll.
  • Status of access points: Meraki access points are always displayed as Up because the REST API used to poll access points does not support polling the status.

Requirements

  • NPM 12.1 or later
  • Meraki account with administrative privileges
  • Enabled access to the Cisco Meraki Dashboard API and generated API key. For details, search for "Cisco Meraki Dashboard API" at https://documentation.meraki.com (© 2015 Cisco Systems, Inc, available at https://documentation.meraki.com, obtained on February 1, 2017.)

Add Meraki organization to NPM

To monitor Meraki infrastructure with NPM, add the Meraki organization to the SolarWinds Platform database as an external node.

Each Meraki organization monitored with NPM uses a node license.

  1. Log in to the SolarWinds Platform Web Console as an administrator.

  2. Click Settings > Manage Nodes, and click Add a Node.

  3. In Polling Method, select Meraki Wireless: API.

    The Polling Hostname or IP Address is disabled and dashboard.meraki.com is used as the default host name for Meraki networks.

  4. Provide the API Key you generated in the Cisco Meraki Dashboard.

  5. If you have multiple organizations registered, click Get Organization List, and select the organization. If you have one registered organization, it is selected by default.

    Polling Meraki organizations uses the global HTTP proxy settings. To change the defaults, click the Configure proxy link.

  6. Review and adjust the device properties.

    1. Review your API key, organization, and proxy settings.

    2. To edit how often the node status, or monitored statistics are updated, change the values in the Polling area.

      For critical nodes, you may need to poll status information or collect statistics more frequently than the default polling intervals.

    3. Enter values for custom properties for the node.

      The Custom Properties area is empty if you have not defined any custom properties for the monitored nodes. See "Add custom properties to nodes" in the SolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide.

    4. To adjust when the status of the node changes to Warning or Critical, edit alerting thresholds for the metric. Select the Override box and set thresholds for the node.

  7. Click OK, Add Node.

The Meraki organization is now monitored as a wireless controller node. After the first poll, you can see the data from the device in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

On the Manage Nodes view, click the added node to see the node details in the Wireless Controller view, or drill down into thin access points listed on the view.

Monitor Meraki organizations

Click My Dashboards > Network > Wireless to see monitored Meraki organizations in the Wireless Overview and to view monitored controllers, access points, and clients.

To find out access points on a controller, select Controllers in the Group by list.

Click a wireless access point to see details of the access point, such as the controller details, thin access point details, active wireless clients and wireless clients connected in the past.

Click the controller name to see the wireless controller details, such as node details or list of thin access points.

Edit Meraki organizations

Edit Meraki polling details, custom properties or alerting thresholds in the same way as other nodes in NPM.

When you add a Meraki organization to NPM, you can no longer change the polling method from the UI.