Automate IT with Dashboard API

Customers, developers, partners and integrators are increasingly using the Meraki Dashboard API to gain new business insights, automate otherwise tedious tasks,  and do truly unique things, making lives easier and networks smarter. Retailers can automate a new store network setup with the click of a button, and hospital staff can monitor emergency room waiting times  using the already-installed Meraki MR access points. We’ve just added several exciting new API capabilities, further expanding the realm of what’s possible. For those interested in a general overview on APIs please see our post from earlier this year.

Recent enhancements include new API calls for client group policy, MX firewall configuration and a new set of endpoints to help streamline management of Bluetooth unique beacon IDs (UUIDs) via the Dashboard API.

Apply a Group Policy Dynamically without RADIUS

Administrators can now use the Dashboard API to view Group Policies configured on your Meraki networks and apply a group policy to, block, or whitelist network clients. Network access controls like changing the authorization of a device post-connection used to be a manual process or required a separate policy engine with RADIUS. Now, security policies can be applied programmatically. 

New MX L3 Firewall API endpoints

MX firewall rules can now be configured, managed or backed up using the Meraki Dashboard API. With the addition of the new endpoint, users now have the same functionality that’s available via Dashboard (Security Appliance > Firewall > Layer 3 > Outbound rules), including the option to enable Syslog. This API capability is ideal for managing large scale, or multi-organization deployments. For a practical example tool, check out a powerful Python-based script via the Meraki GitHub here.

Figure 1: Example [GET] of the firewall rules and [PUT] to update the firewall rules for an MX security appliance network or network template

Unlock new use cases with per-AP Bluetooth Beaconing

Send a targeted ad for jeans when a customer passes by the isle. Offer customers a 20% discount on their meal purchase when they walk in via a mobile app. These are just some of the use cases made possible with Meraki MR bluetooth beacons. Starting in October of 2016, Meraki became the world’s largest beacon gateway vendor. This came about after Meraki made bluetooth radios standard across the entire line of MR access points, and invested in the Meraki Cloud allowing customers to collect and share the bluetooth beacon data via the powerful Scanning API. Customers’ investment in Meraki grew yet again this past November with a new set of enhancements enabling unique, per-access point beacon ID assignment. 

It is now possible to have Meraki auto-assign a unique beacon ID to each access point, or do so manually. All that is needed is to enable the BLE Scanning API, choose “Unique mode”, and the network is ready to be configured for a desired use case. Users can then utilize the Dashboard Devices API to get real-time access to bluetooth analytics and per-AP statistics.

All of our API documentation and sample code can be found on solutions.meraki.com. Building something? See our Postman API collection to get started!

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Tell us what you think! Visit community.meraki.com to let us know how you’re using the APIs and tell us what other new features you’d like to see.