Cloud Managed Network (Meraki) - Pre-Built Installation

Pre-Built Installation Video

Step 1

Before beginning the use-case exercise, you will need to launch your IAP instance.  Log into IAP Cloud and then click the blue Launch icon. Your IAP instance will open.

Step 2

Our IAP lab instance comes configured with an adapter that communicates with a Meraki controller using Meraki’s v1 API.  This enables us to use drag and drop capabilities in workflows to communicate with their API, instead of writing code.  The next challenge most customers run into is deciding which API call is needed in order to trigger the right automations.  This is where Pre-Built Automations come in.  For this use-case exercise, we will pull in Pre-Builts for the Meraki REST API.

Step 3

From the IAP Dashboard, select Admin Essentials.

Step 4

From the Admin Essentials page, click on the Cloud icon next to the Pre-Builts section.   The Itential Open Source Pre-Built Collection will open.

Step 5

We would like to search for the Meraki pre-builts, so we will enter Meraki into the search bar and press enter.  The pre-builts list is filtered.

Step 6

The cisco-meraki-rest bundle has modular, reusable automations, however, we would like to use the cisco-meraki-rest-example bundle, as this will pull in both the examples and the modular components found in the cisco-meraki-rest pre-built.   

 Selecting the pre-built will open an overview and shows the resources included.  To install the pre-built, click the Install button.

Step 7

Once installed, the button name changes to View.  Click the View button.

Step 8

In the Pre-Built Content section, you can view and access the IAP components that make up the pre-built.   While this pre-built is a complete automation containing all of the components necessary to run, this use-case will walk you through building resources yourself so that you can see how easy a modular pre-built makes things.

 When building our use-case, we will utilize 2 pre-built workflows.  Expand the workflows dropdown and select the Create Network-Meraki-REST workflow.  The workflow will open in a new tab.

Step 9

In this workflow, you can see various task types.  IAP has four task types, Termination, Automatic, Operational, and Manual.   Let’s define these individually.

•  Every automation has Termination tasks to START and END the workflow.  All other tasks in the automation will be placed between the START and END termination tasks.
• The green tasks represent Automatic tasks.   These tasks will execute without intervention.
• Next are Operational tasks, which are purple.   Operational tasks are used to control workflows with conditional branches and loops, and to manipulate run time data.
• The fourth task type is Manual tasks.  When used, Manual tasks are grey and represent tasks that required human interaction.

Step 10

We will use this workflow to create our network when building our use-case.  Review the workflow and then close the tab to return to Admin Essentials.

Step 11

Select the Claim Network Devices – Meraki – REST workflow.  This workflow will be used to claim the devices in our workflow.

Step 12

Review the workflow and then close the tab to return to Admin Essentials.