topic Re: my first API in Network Platform API

my first API

Adrian41 — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 13:26:57 GMT

Hello,

I am trying to learn APIs for the first time whilst also trying to get a specific job done and need a little guidance.

We have some WiFi monitoring and reporting software that can see all the BSSID's flying around, but at the moment it cant give us any clear info about them. In order to do that I need to feed it an xml that will tell it which BSSIDs belong to which AP's (and the associated SSID and the band).

We have hundreds of AP's so going through the meraki portal and copying this data manually is painful - I'm hoping I can pull this data with a GET request?

So far I have setup postman with a new environment and set a API key and baseURL variables.

At this point I wanted to turn to some pre-made examples from here but its v0 not v1
https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/7928889/SVmsVg6K#9019f8d0-a1db-4eb1-b45d-c348dc800e32

will these examples be unusable in v1? If so is there a v1 set of basic API's like this somewhere? In any case I coudlnt find something that provided the data fields I'm after 😞

Also - we have lots of different networks and Id need this info for each network - does that complicate things? IE can you do a API call on all networks or is it per network etc?

Thanks!

Re: my first API

Adrian41 — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 13:29:36 GMT

ooh, actually - is this what I need?
https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/#!get-device-wireless-status

Re: my first API

Adrian41 — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 13:54:02 GMT

ok cool, just realised that this page will actually run the API for you as well! 😛

It runs ok but I have to specify the serial number of a specific AP. Is there a way to to run it against all AP's in all networks?

Re: my first API

Adrian41 — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 14:14:32 GMT

found this - /organizations/{organizationId}/deviceStatuses

now just to figure out where to get teh org id from? I found old posts about a v0 api call but the actual post with an explanation isnt up anymore 😘

Re: my first API

Adrian41 — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 14:18:09 GMT

found it!
https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-latest/#!get-organizations

Re: my first API

Adrian41 — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 14:28:30 GMT

aah but it doesn't show what i need 😞

need a "connection stats" call for organisation - which I cant find atm

Re: my first API

sungod — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 15:17:37 GMT

I use https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/#!get-network-wireless-connection-stats

Assuming you want details at SSID level, You need to call it on each SSID on each network (that has at least one AP) in the organization.

To get the list of networks... https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/#!get-organization-networks

To see if a network has any APs, check the devices... https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/#!get-network-devices

To find the SSIDs in a network... https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/#!get-network-wireless-ssids

Re: my first API

Abdulaziz Loonat — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 15:26:23 GMT

I have written plenty of custom applications using the API and what I found to be very useful is to get all your networks and devices (switches, access points) into a back end SQL database. As these do not change very often no point in running APi calls to get this info to pass to another API

I then grab the device info and network ID from database and then run the needed API to do what ever I need to do

Again for monitoring and reporting, I write to a back end SQL database and use PowerBI to create fancy graphs

Example of what I have written

AP channel utilisation. An alert sent out when utilisation is high. A PowerBI report to show AP utilisation over time

AP client connections to diffrent SSID's, or Access Point, again written to back end SQL database and PowerBI reports to see usage over period of time can be grouped into network ID, SSID . An alert sent out if client counts is high so can be proactive as end users complain about performance.

Re: my first API

Adrian41 — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 16:00:35 GMT

I think an SQL database is a bit much for me at the moment - Id have to install and run it from my laptop (getting it installed on a full blown SQL server might be difficult, esp as we are in teh process of getting rid of as many servers as possible).

Passing info from one API call to another seems ok - is it difficult to do?

I have about 47 networks each with anything from 5 to 100 AP devices : / - I have managed to do an API call that returns the serial numbers of every AP device in all networks - so presumably I just need to pass all of these serial numbers to a

/devices/{serial}/wireless/status

thanks!

Re: my first API

Abdulaziz Loonat — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 16:48:47 GMT

yes that is correct, what you could use instead of SQL is a CSV text file to hold the devices you have and with the API call, read the CSV file and pass the device details to the API

so for example if you want to run API on a switch, only pass the device type that is a switch (see example below of a CSV file format)

Re: my first API

Adrian41 — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 16:59:09 GMT

so...I have a json (that I could convert to csv) with the following (iv removed some details for posting here);

{
"mac": "mac ",
"serial": "serial number",
"name": "GD - AP - 2",
"model": "MR33",
"networkId": "networkid",
"orderNumber": "ordernumber",
"claimedAt": "2018-07-30T10:30:08.789690Z",
"tags": [ "recently-added" ],
"productType": "wireless"
},

the file contains hundreds of these - I would need to pull out just the serial numbers into (I guess) a query parameter array - not sure how thats done

Re: my first API

Abdulaziz Loonat — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:03:01 GMT

yes convert the contents of the json out into a csv file

once you have the data in CSV file, you loop thru the file and pass the serial number as a parameter tto the API call.

Re: my first API

sungod — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 20:41:13 GMT

I recommend install Python, version 3.11, then add the Meraki Python library (which handles a lot of low-level stuff for you).

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110/

https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/#!python

It makes working with the API simpler once you get the hang of things.

There are many online sources on learning/using Python. If you get stuck, search with google for what you want to do, i.e. "python array", or "python dictionary" - calls typically return dictionaries, which may have arrays of dictionaries inside them.

Loads of examples here...

https://developer.cisco.com/codeexchange/platforms/meraki#search=meraki&lang=Python

Re: my first API

Adrian41 — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 09:28:49 GMT

is that something you have to do in python?

Re: my first API

Abdulaziz Loonat — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 09:36:04 GMT

you can write code in Python or any other language

Re: my first API

Adrian41 — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 11:29:19 GMT

I think I might be chasing down the wrong route here with the CSV. I think I should clarify my end-goal but not sure if it would be better as new post or keep going here do you think?

Re: my first API

Abdulaziz Loonat — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 11:31:53 GMT

what is your end goal ?

Re: my first API

Adrian41 — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 11:46:15 GMT

takes a breath...

ok, so I need a CSV file that contains data for each and every access point in our organisation.
For each AP I need a list of that AP's name and every enabled BSSID with the BSSIDs band and SSID.

I can see I can get the BSSID/band/SSID info from /devices/serialnumber/wireless/status

{
"basicServiceSets": [
{
"ssidName": "Unconfigured SSID 1",
"ssidNumber": 0,
"enabled": false,
"band": "2.4 GHz",
"bssid": "00:00:00:00:00:00",
"channel": 6,
"channelWidth": "20 MHz",
"power": "16 dBm",
"visible": true,
"broadcasting": false
},
{
"ssidName": "Unconfigured SSID 1",
"ssidNumber": 0,
"enabled": false,
"band": "5 GHz",
"bssid": "00:00:00:00:00:00",
"channel": 44,
"channelWidth": "80 MHz",
"power": "19 dBm",
"visible": true,
"broadcasting": false
},

however you have to feed the API the AP serial number. I assume if I tried to feed it all the serial numbers in one API call, the return would just give me all the "basicServiceSets" without letting me know which belongs to which AP.

I can get the AP serial numbers and names from

/organizations/orgID/devices/statuses?productTypes[]=wireless

{
"name": "GD - AP - 2",
"serial": "0000-0000-0000",
"mac": "00:00:00:00:00:00",
"publicIp": "0.0.0.0",
"networkId": "N_0000000000000000",
"status": "online",
"lastReportedAt": "2022-12-07T11:21:44.044000Z",
"productType": "wireless",
"model": "MR33",
"tags": [ "recently-added" ],
"lanIp": "0.0.0.0",
"gateway": "0.0.0.0",
"ipType": "dhcp",
"primaryDns": "0.0.0.0",
"secondaryDns": "0.0.0.0"
},

I am struggling to imagine the necessary workflow. The serial number and name come from one API and all the other info I need come from another API, but the field that links the two API is the serial number which I don't actually need but its the only thing that ties the AP name to the other bits of info : /

Re: my first API

Abdulaziz Loonat — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 11:54:58 GMT

The workflow would be as follows

The first API calls would be to get all the AP's serial number and save these details to a text file, so example of your text file could be

xxxxxx

yyyyyy

zzzzzz

aaaaa

bbbbb

cccccc

So call /organizations/orgID/devices/statuses?productTypes[]=wireless

once you have got this the next API call would be passing the serial number of the AP to the API call

You would read the text file one line at a time and once you have the data in json format, process this to extract the necessary details, write it to a text file and move onto the next serial number in the text file .

You are basically looping thru the text file, reading the serial number calling the API to get the data you need

Hope this makes sense

Re: my first API

Adrian41 — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 13:13:20 GMT

thanks,

so, would I be doing a single API call per serial number?
Since the data returned from /devices/serialnumber/wireless/status doesn't actually include the serial number or AP name, how would I link the API return data to the serial number that was used in the call?