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Cisco Meraki products are built from the ground up for cloud management and come out of the box with centralized management, layer 7 device and application visibility, real-time web-based diagnostics, monitoring, reporting, and much, much more.

Data source description

Currently, the Cisco Meraki collector generates changelog, security, and connection events. The collector processes the Meraki responses and sends them to the Devo platform, which will categorize all the information received on the following tables:

Source	Description	Devo data tables
Meraki organization changelog	Displays changes made in any network within the current Organization since it was created. This includes configuration changes made to all types of devices, not just administrative changes to the Dashboard. Each time a change is made an event in the ChangeLog will be generated.	`cloud.meraki.api.changelog`
MX security events	Display security events generated by MX Appliances for each existing network. These events are logged as a result of the Connection Monitoring tests failing.	`network.meraki.api.security_events`
Appliance/Switch/Wireless Event Log	Display network events generated by all managed MR/SM/MS/MV devices for each existing network.

network

network.meraki.api.events

Info
For more info about the Cisco Meraki, visit the Cisco Meraki user guide.

Working with API credentials

To set up access to the Cisco Meraki API:

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Verify that you have a valid user account with appropriate permissions by logging into Cisco Meraki.

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Hover over the toolbar on the right-hand side to open the Dashboard.

Go to Organization > Settings.

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Setup

Meraki collector works over the API to retrieve the data, so is needed to enable the access via API Key and generate a Key to allow the collector get the data following the steps below:

Log in to your Meraki account
Go to Organization → Settings.
Image Added
Go to the API Access Dashboard and tick the checkbox Enable access to the Cisco Meraki Dashboard API.
Image RemovedImage Added
Once you have enabled access to the API, we need to create the API Key. To do this, click the profile link below the checkbox, or by clicking your username and selecting your username, and clicking My Profile.
Image RemovedImage Added
Go to API Access > → API Keys and click Generate New API Key.

Note

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If Meraki dashboard IP filtering is enabled, make sure to allow access for the collector IP or IP range.
Be careful, the API key will inherit the permissions of the user who creates it, so it must be created with a user with at least "organization - read only" permissions.

Run the collector

Once the data source is configured, you can either send us the required information if you want us to host and manage the collector for you (Cloud collector), or deploy and host the collector in your own machine using a Docker image (On-premise collector).

Rw ui tabs macro

Rw tab

title	Cloud collector

We use a piece of software called Collector Server to host and manage all our available collectors. If you want us to host this collector for you, get in touch with us and we will guide you through the configuration.

Rw tab

title	On-premise collector

This data collector can be run in any machine that has the Docker service available because it should be executed as a docker container. The following sections explain how to prepare all the required setup for having the data collector running.

Structure

The following directory structure should be created for being used when running the Cisco Meraki collector:

Code Block

<any_directory>
└── devo-collectors/
    └── cisco_meraki/
        ├── certs/
        │   ├── chain.crt
        │   ├── <your_domain>.key
        │   └── <your_domain>.crt
        └── config/ 
            └── config-cisco_meraki.yaml

Devo certificates

In Devo, go to Administration → Credentials → X.509 Certificates, download the Certificate, Private key and Chain CA and save them in <any directory>/devo-collectors/cisco_meraki/certs. Learn more about security credentials in Devo here.

Editing the config-cisco_meraki.yaml file

In the config-cisco_meraki.yaml file, replace the <short_unique_identifier>, <api_key> values and enter the ones that retrieved in the previous steps. In the <short_unique_identifier> placeholder, enter the chosen value.

Code Block

globals:
  debug: false                                                                # File system persistence ON
  id: not_used
  name: cisco_meraki
  persistence:                                                                # Directory where the persistence will be saved in case of using filesystem
    type: filesystem
    config:
      directory_name: state                                                   # Cloud Devo config EU (for US use us.elb.relay.logtrust.net)
outputs:
  devo_1:
    type: devo_platform
    config:
      address: eu.elb.relay.logtrust.net                                        
      port: 443
      type: SSL
      chain: chain.crt
      cert: <your_domain>.crt 
      key: <your_domain>.key
inputs:
  cisco_meraki:
    id: <short_unique_identifier>                                             # The value of this field will be used internally for having independent persistence areas
    enabled: true
    debug: true
    requests_per_second: 5                                                   # Setting up requests per second. 5 recommended.
    services:																 # Services available for this collector are Alerts, Secure Score and Secure score control profile
      network-events:
        api_key: '<api_key>'                                                 # API Key obtained in the Meraki profile
        start_time: '2021-01-01T00:00:00.000000Z'                            # Collector Initial time.
      security_events:
        api_key: '<api_key>'                                                 # API Key obtained in the Meraki profile
        start_time: '2021-01-01T00:00:00.000000Z'                            # Collector Initial time.
      changelog:
        api_key: '<api_key>'  												 # API Key obtained in the Meraki profile 
		start_time: '2021-01-01T00:00:00.000000Z'                            # Collector Initial time.

Note

The “start_time” fields must have the following format:

Alerts “start_time” format: 0000-00-00T00:00:00.000Z

Note
The Security-events Service may generate error logs if you do not have an MX appliance.

Download the Docker image

The collector should be deployed as a Docker container. Download the Docker image of the collector as a .tgz file by clicking the link in the following table:

Collector Docker image	SHA-256 hash
collector-cisco-meraki-docker-image-1.3.46.tgz	`324c432b6876f0eb5705eabab09576faba811cf83e69f24b9686e6ba602df07aa915ba1708713d6e3022f8e63e98ca78099ec93275dbb649495e4c4c3d420a2c`

Use the following command to add the Docker image to the system:

Code Block
gunzip -c collector-cisco-meraki-docker-image-<version>.tgz \| docker load

Once the Docker image is imported, it will show the real name of the Docker image (including version info). Replace "<version>" with a proper value.

The Docker image can be deployed on the following services:

Docker

Execute the following command on the root directory <any_directory>/devo-collectors/cisco_meraki/

Code Block

docker run \
--name collector-cisco_meraki \
--volume $PWD/certs:/devo-collector/cisco_meraki/certs \
--volume $PWD/config:/devo-collector/cisco_meraki/config \
--volume $PWD/state:/devo-collector/cisco_meraki/state \
--env CONFIG_FILE=config-cisco_meraki.yaml \
--rm -it docker.devo.internal/collector/meraki_collector:<version>

Note
Replace `<version>` with the required value.

Docker Compose

The following Docker Compose file can be used to execute the Docker container. It must be created in the <any_directory>/devo-collectors/cisco_meraki/ directory.

Code Block

version: '3'
services:
  collector-cisco_meraki:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    image: docker.devo.internal/collector/meraki_collector:${IMAGE_VERSION:-latest}
    container_name: collector-cisco_meraki
    volumes:
      - ./certs:/devo-collector/cisco_meraki/certs
      - ./config:/devo-collector/cisco_meraki/config
      - ./state:/devo-collector/cisco_meraki/state
    environment:
      - CONFIG_FILE=${CONFIG_FILE:-config-cisco_meraki.yaml}

To run the container using docker-compose, execute the following command from the <any_directory>/devo-collectors/cisco_meraki/ directory:

Code Block
IMAGE_VERSION=<version> docker-compose up -d

Note
Replace `<version>` with the required value.

Change log for 1.x.x

Release

Released on

Release type

Details

Recommendations

v1.3.0

21 Mar 2022

Status

colour	Purple
title	FEATURE

Status

colour	Yellow
title	VULNS

Status

colour	Green
title	IMPROVEMENTS

New features:

The resilience has been improved with a new feature that restart the collector when the Devo connections is lost and it cannot be recovered.

Improvements:

The underlay IFC SDK has been updated to v1.1.3.

Vulnerabilities mitigation:

All critical and high vulnerabilities have been mitigated.

Upgrade

v1.3.2

06 Apr 2022

Status

colour	Yellow
title	VULNS

Vulnerabilities mitigation:

All critical and high vulnerabilities have been mitigated.

Upgrade

v1.3.4

05 May 2022

Status

colour	Green
title	IMPROVEMENTS

Status

colour	Red
title	BUG FIX

Improvements:

When the Meraki API returns an HTTP CODE 429 (Too many requests), the collector handle it to avoid overflooding.

Bug fixes:

Some error messages were logged at the debug level and are now logged at the error level correctly.

Upgrade

v1.3.5

11 Jul 2022

Status

colour	Green
title	IMPROVEMENTS

Status

colour	Red
title	BUG FIX

Improvements:

The number of debug traces has been increased to provide better visibility when troubleshooting.

Bug fixes:

Logging AssertionError trace thrown when requesting invalid product types from networks without those product types is now logged in debug level.

Upgrade

v1.3.6

03 Aug 2022

Status

colour	Green
title	IMPROVEMENTS

Status

colour	Red
title	BUG FIX

Improvements:

The number of debug traces has been increased to provide better visibility when troubleshooting.
The network_security_events (MX) service has been enhanced with new logic that avoids requesting MX events from networks without MX appliances. This reduces the number of unnecessary API requests to Meraki that were returning 400 HTTP CODE.
Meraki Python package has been upgraded from v1.18.2 to v1.22.1
The events are sent to Devo in batches, increasing the performance.

Bug fixing:

Fixed a bug where the data extraction services via network_event_log and network_security_events stopped pulling events after retrieving the first page of 1,000 events. This behavior was causing some delay in the ingest in networks with a high volume of events.
Fixed how persistence of the network_security_events service is handled and it now stores a unique save point for each available network instead of one for all networks.
Fixed a bug where events were being sent to Devo without proper ordering. Now all events are ordered from the origin by the API.

Recommended version

Version	Old Version 1	New Version 2
Changes made by	Juan Tomás Alonso Nieto (Deactivated)	Juan Tomás Alonso Nieto (Deactivated)
Saved on	May 23, 2022	Aug 08, 2022

Page Comparison

Versions Compared

Key

Data source description

Working with API credentials

Setup

Run the collector

Structure

Devo certificates

Editing the config-cisco_meraki.yaml file

Download the Docker image

Docker

Docker Compose

Change log for 1.x.x