Meraki MV Offline Debugger

This flask app serves as an automatic troubleshooting and ticketing platform for Meraki MV Cameras connected to MS Switches. The app primarily listens for Meraki Camera Offline Webhook Alerts, executes the MV troubleshooting algorithm, and generates a ServiceNow ticket if the troubleshooting algorithm is unsuccessful in bringing up the MV camera.

The troubleshooting algorithm consists of the steps:

• Receive Camera Down Alert
• Delay 5 minutes -> Check Status
• Cycle Connected Switch port
• Delay 5 minutes -> Check Status
• Generate Ticket

The Delay is configurable and set at 5 minutes by default. To modify the Delay parameter adjust the global variable at the top of app.py

DELAY_TIME = 5  # time to wait between polls in minutes

This app also listens for additional Webhooks:

• MS Switch Offline
• MX Offline
• MV Critical Hardware Alert

If an alert is generated for an MX or MS device which affects an MV Camera, the app intelligently creates a ticket for the MX or MS with a list of affected cameras. This reduces the number of tickets and introduces network level intelligence.

Note:
This code works best with the topology MX -> MS -> MV. If the environment doesn't have this topology, there may be issues creating tickets. The intelligent ticket creation depends on the order of alerts and this topology. For ex: an MX alert should come in first before the affected MS and MV devices. The order is usually right, but it can be unpredictable. To guarantee correct behavior, see the Meraki Alerts section.

Contacts

• Trevor Maco

Solution Components

• Python 3.x
• Ngrok
• Meraki MV
• Meraki Webhooks, APIs
• Docker
• Flask
• SQLite
• Redis
• Celery
• Nginx
• ServiceNow

Prerequisites

Meraki API Keys

In order to use the Meraki API, you need to enable the API for your organization first. After enabling API access, you can generate an API key. Follow these instructions to enable API access and generate an API key:

1. Login to the Meraki dashboard
2. In the left-hand menu, navigate to Organization > Settings > Dashboard API access
3. Click on Enable access to the Cisco Meraki Dashboard API
4. Go to My Profile > API access
5. Under API access, click on Generate API key
6. Save the API key in a safe place. The API key will only be shown once for security purposes, so it is very important to take note of the key then. In case you lose the key, then you have to revoke the key and a generate a new key. Moreover, there is a limit of only two API keys per profile.

For more information on how to generate an API key, please click here.

Note: You can add your account as Full Organization Admin to your organizations by following the instructions here.

ngrok

The webhook receivers for Meraki Alerts require https URLs. Since this code runs on http://localhost:80 by default, it requires a forwarding address with https in order to receive the webhooks. To emulate this, ngrok is used.
Follow these instructions to set up ngrok:

1. Create a free account or login to Ngrok.
2. Retrieve your auth token by navigating to Getting Started > Your Authtoken on the menu on the left-hand side. Copy the token on this page.
3. Then install the client library depending on your OS here.
4. Once you have ngrok installed, update the ngrok configuration file with your auth token by running the following command on the terminal/command prompt:

ngrok authtoken [yourtoken]

replacing [yourtoken] with the authtoken you copied in Step 2.

5. Start the ngrok tunnel for port 80 with the command:

ngrok http 80

Note: It's recommend to use port 443 for secure communication (if not using Ngrok). Refer to this guide to see how to enable SSL on Nginx (in docker) using Let's Encrypt. Change the relevant sections of docker-compose.yml and the nginx/conf/default.conf based on the guide.

Meraki Alerts

In order to generate webhooks for the Meraki Alerts this code is written to create tickets for, follow these steps:

1. Login to the Meraki dashboard.
2. In the left-hand menu, navigate to Network-wide > Configure > Alerts.
3. Here, select the appropriate checkboxes for which events should generate alerts. Under Cameras, select A camera goes offline for [X] minutes. Under Security Appliance, select A security appliance goes offline for [X] minutes. Under Switch, select A switch goes offline for [X] minutes. To guarantee that the alerts are sent in the right order, you can modify the amount of time that should pass before an alert is generated. For instance, keep the security appliance at 5 minutes, but increase the time of the switch to 10 minutes and the camera to 15 minutes. Thus, if a router goes down, then after 5 minutes, a ticket will be created for it once the alert is generated but it will take 5 more minutes before the switch connected to the router will generate an alert.
4. Next, you need to add the webhook receiver to send the alert webhooks to. Under the Webhooks section, add an HTTP receiver. Give it a name and copy the https URL for the flask app as the receiver URL followed by /alerts. Use ngrok webhook receiver if running locally followed by /alerts.
5. Then, add the webhook receiver as a default recipient of alerts. Scroll to the top of the page to the Alerts Settings section, add the webhook receiver that you just created to the Default recipients list. Add shared secret as well, note this for later.
6. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save to save these changes.

For more information about Meraki Alerts and Notifications, please click here.

Docker

To support scalability, this app uses several technologies (Celery, Redis, etc.) that are easily tied together with Docker. Docker is the recommended deployment method. Install Docker here.

ServiceNow

Gather the url and username/password for a ServiceNow Admin associated with the target instance. A free developer instance can be created with the Developer Program

• Default Ticket Parameters:

Default description, impact, urgencies, etc. are set in the method create_service_now_ticket in app.py. Please refer to this method to make changes to default values.

• Ticket Clean Up Feature:

This feature marks a ticket as 'Resolved' if the device is active 'X' hours after the creation of a ticket that's still unresolved.

The default checking period is 1 hour, but this can be configured with the global parameter TICKET_REMOVAL_TIME at the top of app.py

TICKET_REMOVAL_TIME = 1

• Duplicate Ticket Prevention Feature:

This feature stops duplicate tickets from being created for an MV Camera with an existing ticket. This is useful to avoid multiple ServiceNow tickets for multiple webhooks alerts on a single camera (ex: Critical Hardware Failure and Offline Alert)

Installation/Configuration

1. Clone this repository with git clone [repository name]
2. Rename the .env_sample file to .env. This file holds sensitive environment variables which will be passed to the docker container securely. Rename config_sample.py to config.py (located at: flask_app/config_sample.py).
3. Add Meraki API key and Webhook Shared Secret (.env), and CSV File Path for Ticket information (flask_app/config.py) to environment variables. The CSV File is a backup of ticket information for manual ServiceNow ticket creation.

# config.py
TICKET_CSV_PATH = ""

# .env
MERAKI_API_KEY="<replace>"
SHARED_SECRET="<replace>"

# Example: MERAKI_API_KEY="1234567890"

4. Enable ServiceNow (Default = True) (flask_app/config.py), add ServiceNow instance variables (.env) obtained from the prerequisites section.

# config.py
SERVICE_NOW_ENABLED = True

# .env
SERVICENOW_INSTANCE="<replace>"
SERVICENOW_USERNAME="<replace>"
SERVICENOW_PASSWORD="<replace>"

# Example: SERVICENOW_INSTANCE="https://example.com"

5. Enable or Disable the ServiceNow 'Ticket Cleanup' and/or the 'Duplicate Ticket Prevention' feature (flask_app/config.py).

TICKET_CLEANUP = False
DUPLICATE_TICKETS = True

6. Set up a Python virtual environment. Make sure Python 3 is installed in your environment, and if not, you may download Python here. Once Python 3 is installed in your environment, you can activate the virtual environment with the instructions found here.
7. Install the requirements with pip3 install -r flask_app/requirements.txt

Usage

To run the program, use the docker command:

$ docker-compose up -d --build

This will build the containers in the background and launch them. If you have docker desktop, you should see (assuming no errors):

The docker-compose file runs 3 main python scripts:

1. db.py

This script creates the database that will hold the connection and status information of the routers, switches, and cameras in the network (critical for intelligent ticketing).

Once this code completes, it will print out three empty lists representing the items in the routers, switches, and cameras tables. It will also create the database file sqlite.db.

2. populate.py

The next step is to populate the database with the devices in your Meraki network, which is done with this script.

Once the code completes, it will print out the contents of the routers, switches, and camera tables in the database representing (Source Serial, Connected Device Serial, Source Status)

Note: this code is written with the assumption that the switches are connected to routers and the access points are connected to switches. If this is not the case in your environment, it will likely generate an error. To remedy this, add more conditions in the file. For example, there is a condition to check if the device types connected to one another are an 'Camera' and 'switch'. Suppose you have switches connected to switches in your environment, you will need to add a condition to the code that checks if the device types are both 'switch' and then write the code to handle this condition.

3. app.py (flask run)

The main web app will start and begin listening on default port 5000.

Once a webhook is received, the contents will be printed out:

A down camera will trigger the troubleshooting automation. The results of the automation are written to a log file in flask_app/logs/[alerting serial].log:

A Ticket is created in ServiceNow if the troubleshooting process is unable to revive the down camera.

The ticket content is written to a CSV File specified in config.py as well.

LICENSE

Provided under Cisco Sample Code License, for details see LICENSE

CODE_OF_CONDUCT

Our code of conduct is available here

CONTRIBUTING

See our contributing guidelines here

DISCLAIMER:

Please note: This script is meant for demo purposes only. All tools/ scripts in this repo are released for use "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind, including, but not limited to their installation, use, or performance. Any use of these scripts and tools is at your own risk. There is no guarantee that they have been through thorough testing in a comparable environment and we are not responsible for any damage or data loss incurred with their use.
You are responsible for reviewing and testing any scripts you run thoroughly before use in any non-testing environment.