Locate Assets with a Chat Bot

Investigo is Latin for track or trace out, investigate. Investigo is a bot for Spark, Cisco’s unified communications service, which enables customers to use wireless infrastructure to locate Wi-Fi capable assets. The Investigo is a mash-up bot that uses several solutions: Spark, Tropo and Meraki wireless access points, spanning from the enterprise to the Internet of Things world.

Created by 

Rafael Carvalho

Demo

Investigo Demo Server

• This project utilizes data provided by http://live-map.meraki.com, which shows anonymized location information of Meraki employees in the HQ of the company.

Features

• Track a specific wireless device using its name.

Quick Usage

• Find the bot on WebEx Teams using its email: investigo@sparkbot.io
• Start a 1:1 conversation with Investigo on Cisco WebEx Teams and use the available commands.
• There might be a delay on the first command you run (the server needs to be woken up)

Available commands on Spark:

• list assets 
  • provides a list of registered assets
• find asset 
  • name of the asset (locates the asset on the map)
• find MAC Address 
  • find a wireless device using its MAC address
• fix name of the asset 
  • updates the MAC address of the asset to an address that is currently being seen on the network
• open 
  • gives a link to the web console of the app

Developer Mode

If you want to use it on your Meraki network, here are the steps:

1. Spin up the server that will receive the location information from Meraki Dashboard. Follow the guide: https://github.com/meraki/scanning-api-app
2. Download the code available at: https://github.com/rafael-carvalho/investigo-meraki
3. Configure your server settings:
   • Install all libraries described on requirements.txt.
   • Make sure you have a PostgreSQL server running.
   • Make sure you change all environmental variables on the .env file:

     ADMIN_NAME=admin's name on Spark
     APP_SETTINGS=config.DevelopmentConfig
     DATABASE_URL=postgres://...
     NOTIFICATION_SMS_PHONE_NUMBER=+12345678900
     SECRET_KEY=changethis
     SHOW_WEB_LINK=True
     SPARK_TOKEN=get your token from https://developer.webex.com
     

4. Run your server: python run.py
5. This server needs to be accessible from the Internet. If you don’t have a public IP:
   • You can use http://ngrok.com for to expose your localhost to the Internet.
   • Alternatively, you can host your app on Heroku. ProcFile provided on the github repository
6. Go to your code and change web/externalapis/meraki/__init__.py to point to the server you created on step 1.
7. Add a JSON file describing your location to the same folder as app/static/server_config/meraki/meraki-hq-san-francisco.json and change the file path on the same file of the previous step. Don’t worry about the id’s on this file.
8. Setup the server:
   • Use a browser to go to your server’s homepage: https://public-ip.com
   • Click settings on the top menu
   • Select cloud as your deployment mode
   • Add a cloud server
   • Use demo network
9. Create a WebEx Teams webhook and point all messages to your public IP:
   • You can use Spark’s API documentation for that: https://developer.webex.com/endpoint-webhooks-post.html
   • Or you can use the helper script: https://github.com/rafael-carvalho/update-spark-webhook

Disclaimer:

This solution is meant for educational/proof of concept purposes only. Any use of this tool is at your own risk. There is no guarantee that they have been thorough testing in a comparable environment and we are not responsible for any damage or data loss incurred with their use.