Meraki node status maintained by API call into Solarwinds generated by Alert webhooks from Meraki

tdavison

Hello,

We are looking for a way to reduce the network overhead of the Meraki node polling updates in Solarwinds.  We looked into the "Meraki Wireless: API" Polling method option but this doesn't provide status of APs.  Has anyone found a way to update the status of a Meraki node in Solarwinds by possibly an API call into Solarwinds that is generated by Alert webhooks from the Meraki Dashboard?  Or possibly another method of setting the up/down status of a node without having the node poll regularly?

Thanks for any help, first time posting on the THWACK, just let me know if any other details are needed. : )

Tom

mesverrum

64 bytes every 2 minutes for pinging up/down status is considered excessive network overhead for your use case? Seems like an excessive bit of micro-optimizing.

In any case, Orion doesn't have any native ingestion of web hook data sources. To do what you are describing you'd need to set all your meraki nodes as external nodes so that Orion stops trying to poll them itself . Then you'd DIY yourself an http server set up as a listener that would parse those incoming messages and kick off scripts to set the status of those nodes. Since they aren't polled you can just edit their status in the API and set it to anything you want and Orion won't try to change it.

It has been a couple years for me since I worked on any Meraki systems, but IIRC any syslogs or traps sent by Meraki will show up with the cloud controller as the source, so natively Orion wouldn't associate the trap event with the individual node in question, but if you wanted to get fancy with a custom SQL based alert rule you could fairly easily parse the message and figure out the correct node and have an alert action to set the status down/up as needed. I feel like that would be a lot simpler than futzing around with the web hook stuff.