Meraki Wireless Health APIs Make Network Assurance Easier

As Meraki continues to drive cloud managed networking into new markets, we continue to evolve our offerings to help customers and partners adopt this mission. With large enterprise, campuses, and service providers all rapidly growing Meraki wireless deployments, Meraki continues to rapidly evolve to drive innovation in these markets. As part of the strategy to make our rich data sources available to our customers, we introduced Meraki Wireless Health and a brand new product line Meraki Insight at Cisco Live in Barcelona 2018.

In addition to our rapid adoption of Meraki Wireless Health, Meraki’s API platform has also been experiencing rapid adoption by our customer and partner community. Since the introduction of APIs less than 2 years ago, the API platform has grown into 100’s of unique APIs and over 20 million API calls a day

Access all Meraki Wireless Health features via an API interface

Wireless Health has been an instant hit with hundreds of thousands of customers now actively using Meraki Wireless Health, we have maintained our focus on wireless health to build out additional value for our customers. To build on top of all of these successes, Meraki is proud to announce that we are now launching full Wireless Health API endpoints. This is one of our largest API launches to date, and all of our customers now have access. These new API endpoints will make it easy for both Meraki’s Partner Solutions team and Cisco’s DevNet team to drive simple Open Source and Partner Solutions that can help simplify the management of wireless deployments of all types and for all verticals.

With this launch we are creating 3 key types of API endpoints

1. Connection Health – Summarizes the connection health of a network, AP or client
2. Connection Failures – Returns a full list of association, authentication, DHCP and DNS issues
3. Network Latency – Summarizes the latency of a network, AP or client.

The great thing about these new API endpoints is we have designed them to be flexible. You can filter all of them by a specific VLAN or SSID. You can also call the summary statistics by using start time and end times.

Leverage our DevNet community to build your own customized analysis or visualization

Using the new APIs to create working solutions

During the development of the Wireless Health API endpoints, Meraki worked with DevNet to validate the format of the API endpoints and make them as robust as possible. Our teams also worked together to create a real working solution using the new API endpoints. With the experienced DevNet team working with the Meraki team, we were able to put together a full working demonstration of the new API endpoints within one week. Now that Meraki APIs are part of Cisco DevNet we now have access to over 500,000 DevNet developers who can create services and solutions based on the Meraki APIs.

Wireless infrastructure supports mobile POS devices

Together we created a solution that allows one of our retail customers to correlate how network health, customer foot traffic, and point of sale statistics all interact – and do it in a single dashboard for over 50 separate locations! With mobile point of sale (POS) devices becoming a predominant method of in-store payments, the wireless infrastructure has become more important than ever. So we wanted to create a dashboard where our customers could quickly check the overall current health of the retail store, but also (thanks to some open source engineering) see the historical health. We also worked with the customer to create an overall health score for their retail stores, so that they can roll up the disparate and complex data set into a single scoring rank. This unleashes an incredibly powerful data point, where the retailer can quickly identify poorly performing retail locations and within seconds dive in and investigate the root cause.

Complete visibility into the retail locations data using Kibana

Unleash the power of your data in the Meraki platform

This is just the beginning of Meraki unleashing the power of the data in our platform. In the months ahead, we will continue to release more network health metrics that will further streamline the running of enterprise networks. We are looking forward to all the great things our customers and partners are going to create with these newly introduced API endpoints, and our team will continue to leverage our agile development environment to drive more innovations in the networking space.

Since 2017 the Cisco Meraki team has been working with the Cisco DevNet team. As a result, over the last year a large number of partners have leveraged our API infrastructure to create solutions specific to unique use cases. We are constantly adding new solutions and partners to our ecosystem, and they are easily available for anyone to view.