all right so let's go ahead and start now so um yeah I hope my screen is visible everything is coming through okay um welcome everyone to getting started with service graph connector for Meraki I am joining from San Francisco USA and today's session is a part of the live on servicenow which is a curated event series to connect you with servicenow experts and peers that can help you deploy your products and services and Achieve value faster we hope you join us again at another webinar or Meetup and you can see the schedule by signing uh scanning the QR code or using the link in the chat all right so some housekeeping items per year is that we have saved time at the end for Q a so please use the Q a button in the webinar uh we'll see that at the bottom of your screen and use that q a to post any questions you might have this presentation will be recorded and will be shared in the servicenow community so don't worry if you want to leave in between or you cannot just you know stay for the rest of the part it will be recorded and after the event you will be prompted to fill out a short survey and we greatly appreciate you filling out these surveys and your feedback which we can use all right so starting with uh my introduction I'm shweta palande I am a technical marketing engineer at Cisco Meraki and Joe uh today I have Joe with me Joe you want to introduce ourselves say hi yeah thank you good morning good afternoon good evening my name is Joe maistry I'm one of the EV ghost system btms here at Meraki and looking forward to meeting with you all here shortly awesome thank you so today's agenda I want to keep it simple as you say in Meraki keep things simple uh I want to win today's agenda talk about the Meraki platform on a very high level some of you might be new to Meraki or might be exploring Meraki solutions to all make sure that we cover what Meraki platform is actually at a very high level and then we'll talk about apis uh what actually apis do and what they mean to our system and all the Integrations that we do around with platforms like servicenow and then we will Deep dive into how Meraki uh integrates with servicenow and how the connector works and how you can derive value from that and then at the end Joe will talk about our Meraki ecosystem what it is um servicenow is just one of the Integrations that is part of Cisco Meraki but there are tons of other Integrations out there and Joe will be able to give us a sneak peek into what that word looks like all right so with that let's get started um so what is Cisco Meraki Cisco Meraki is a simple Cloud managed networking platform and now what does cloud managed networking mean here meraki's cloud-based management provides a centralized visibility and control over both merakis wired and wireless networking Hardware this integrated with meraki's entire product portfolio of Wireless switching security cameras sensors and many more it provides a rich feature scalable and intuitive centralized management for networks of any size the Meraki Cloud platform will allow you to manage your Meraki network devices via a single and simple and secure platform so on one hand if you see we have the Meraki dashboard it's a centralized tool a web-based GUI which you can use to Monitor and configure Meraki devices and then on the other hand we have the dashboard apis which help you to interact directly with the Meraki Cloud platform and the Meraki manage devices so the dashboard apis are one of the strong pillars of all our Integrations the service now plus Meraki Integrations which I'll be talking about in few minutes is built on top of these dashboard apis so on one hand we have our dashboard apis which customers can use to build tailored solutions for their use cases and on the other hand we have our ecosystem partner applications which are again built on top of these apis and Joe will give more insight into these types of Integrations in the later half of this presentation so I would like to spend a minute here to share our API documentation and why it's critical for you to know about it so let's address the question of why do we even use apis how does it help in Enterprise networking apis can accelerate everything from Minor Adjustments to enterprise-sized deployments by automating configuration changes or provisioning and data collection thus reducing your overall business cost and similar to what the use case is here where you can integrate servicenow in Meraki using the apis you can increase efficiency by realizing additional value from your existing business systems and by integrating Meraki apis with your line of other line of business applications you can also mitigate Risk by making data-driven business decisions apis will enable you to retrieve historical and real-time metrics about your network which you can then use to analyze in order to predict or make decisions about your Network Health the Meraki API documentation which you can find at meraki.io that's the developer documentation link uh it has more than 600 plus endpoints available and you can use these endpoints to pull all sorts of data from your network this API documentation is interactive which means that you can execute an API call within the dock itself and you can see the response there immediately so if you see their ER in the snapshot here on the right hand side we have like an interactive API talk where you just run the query and you will immediately see the response below it all right so now that we covered the foundations of Meraki Integrations let's jump to one of our most widely used application which is the service graph connector for Meraki this graph connector application is an integration between Meraki and servicenow and is available to install for free from the servicenow App Store this application supports alert management and synchronization of Meraki organizations networks devices into the service now service graph and servicenow cmdb you can use this application to generate organizations networks device and device statuses within servicenow for increased visibility in your network so this application communicates with the Meraki apis that I covered in the previous slide in order to import configuration details from your organizations which is then transformed into records in the organization's networks and the network gear and child tables within the servicenow table this application also captures device alerts from the Meraki dashboard and then creates incidents in servicenow from the alerts that are received and then the created incident can then be automatically linked to the related Meraki devices and then it can be assigned to a particular support team or a group to take further actions this application is a key enabler for our servicenow customers who are looking to deploy Meraki it all it's also a demonstration of the maturity and extensibility of the Meraki platform there's no additional coding that you require in order to get this app running in your environment this custom Integrations is built on the power of Meraki dashboard API and also our web hooks so let's see how this application actually works this application will provide a one-way sync from your Meraki organization to servicenow using the Meraki dashboard API it also solves the challenges of importing Meraki devices their custom properties and their relative organization or network positions within the cloud platform one important thing to note here is that this application will not make any changes to your Meraki environment it will simply pull that data and send it over to servicenow for further services you will also need to generate the Meraki API key from the Meraki dashboard if you don't already have one and the minimum role you require in order to use this API key in servicenow is read only access to the Meraki organization so if you just have a read-only access to the API key that's that will work too then in order to enable the API key for your organization you can navigate to within the Meraki dashboard go you can navigate under organizations settings and dashboard API access all you have to do is check mark on the enable access to dashboard API and once that is enabled you will be prompted to go to your profile page in order to generate an API key so once this API key is generated you can store it in a safe place and then use it just you know copy and paste it in your service class application uh these API keys are sensitive information so make sure that you store it in a safe place and once you uh let's say you just create the API key and maybe forget the API key uh you will have to revoke that key and create a new one just because for security purposes we don't allow uh reusing the same key once it's lost you cannot retrieve that so keep that thing in mind but all these instructions are available in our developer documentations if you have any more questions or concerns around that all right so once you uh now once you've created your API key you have API key access to your organizations now there are in total four API calls that the service graph application makes to the Meraki environment in order to retrieve the necessary information the first call that is made is get organizations this API call Will retrieve a list of all the organizations that are associated with the API key that you first configured the second call will be to get a list of all the networks that are associated with each of the organizations so if you're not sure uh like what organizations or networks your API key has access to you can go back to the API documentation and execute these two API calls in order to see the results so let's see how you can do that quickly right um I if I as I mentioned before Meraki dot IO that is our API developer documentation this is what it looks like and on the left hand navigation menu um I went ahead went into organizations and this is the get organizations call that I retrieved in the configuration tab over here if you click you have an option to configure your API keys and other parameters right now I'm using a demo API key which I posted in the config panel and then once that is done simply have to do is run and if you see when I run that I for that particular API key these are the demo organizations that are associated I get a list of all the organizations so this this helps me um you know get a clear picture of what organizations this API key is going to access and similarly if you want to check what networks you have access to you can go on the left navigation and search for get networks um get organization ID slash networks API call and get a list of all the networks that you have access to so once these two API calls are done the next two API calls are around get organization devices this will get or retrieve a list of all the devices that are setting in your organizations and after that there will be another API call to retrieve the status of all these devices that are tied to your organization if you want to see what kind of fields are present in the response body you can again go back to your developer documentation and simply execute the device statuses or guide API call and you'll be able to see what devices and what other response fields that are coming Associated to your organization okay so when you first install the app you will see that the service graph connector for Meraki this application will provide a guided setup once you install it this will be available in the navigation option if you click on the setup you will see this available and then we uh also suggest that you install this in a sandbox or a developer instance first to test the solution once the functionality and the data has been verified you can feel more confident about installing it in your production instance so once you're in the guided setup you can go ahead and start executing the steps one by one the first step again here is to obtain a Meraki API key and then connect it to your servicenow instance a scheduled job is run in order to import Meraki data via the API and once this job is imported the data is then mapped to the related cmdb tables this job will use a script called SG Meraki devices in order to obtain the Meraki data so if you navigate in the application and go to data sources you will find the script named as SG Meraki devices listed within that and you can open that script and look what's going on inside uh the steps also which are listed in the setup will help you configure the API key and then actually set up the connection with your miraculate network so once you set up your Meraki key and establish the connection the next step is to pass a list of organizations that you wish to give access to and Import in the connector application so the system will import all organizations attached to the API Key by default unless specified explicitly in the setup So to avoid accidental Imports and ensure proper permissions make sure that you define the specific organization IDs that you want to sync and the setup will also guide you to configure properties for mapping device nodes location lookup and then finally you can go ahead and test the connection so once the connection is successful The Next Step would be to configure a web hook alert uh in your Meraki dashboard which is explained in detail in our developer documentation at this point you can also configure the appropriate assignment groups for your incidents and your tickets so in order to configure your web hook details you will have to login to your Meraki dashboard and then navigate to networks and then under networks there is an option to select alerts network-wide alerts uh in that page you will find an option to configure alerts which you want to be sent over to servicenow the Meraki web of payload template has a built-in template for servicenow this template supports the required authentication headers and the password complexity implemented with the San Diego release of servicenow the servicenow connector relies on basic authentication to send a web hook to the service the setup this setup previously required that the Meraki admin sets the https server URL with a username and password that is embedded within the URL however with the service now San Diego release passwords are automatically defined for you and are kind of complex to embed within the URL which can often result in an incompatible URL so with webhook templates what we can do is we can now pass the shared secret value with a base64 encoding and apply the appropriate headers so this eliminates the need for you to pass a username and password in the URL itself like before and the is also in general improves the security aspect of these alerts so with the webhook configured you can now finally go to the next step of scheduling the import job um so once you configure the job to import your organization devices into the connector you can at this point test and load the records and verify the details before scheduling your import job you can also test The Connection by clicking on the test to load 20 records link which you'll find under the related Links of the data source and if you are able to load this test data that means your connection was set up correctly now once the device details are imported we will start seeing incidents that are being opened for any alerts that you have enabled to to receive on the Meraki dashboard side and these alerts will start coming into your service now so now that you have configured everything and let's say you want to quickly test all the available Meraki alert types or you want to validate that a web hook alert that you have enabled will actually generate an incident or not you can use a postman collection I have linked that Postman collection over here but it's also available in our developer documentation you can use this Postman collection to just send a dummy post with the body of the webhook data you can find this Postman collection in the developer dogs and if you're not familiar with Postman then a simple call request to make a post request to your configured backbook URL will also do so you have to make sure that in the post body the sample payload that you have you have to update the device serial with the actual device serial of serial number of the device that has been imported into your cmdb database so for example this is what the postman collection for webhook samples look like and Postman also has a desktop application or you can simply use a web browser version of it as well if you click on run and Postman over here it will prompt you to either open a desktop version or the web browser I'm currently using the web browser version and if you see here are a number of alerts that are associated with webhooks so let's say we just click on access points went down alert and you will see that this is the webrook URL which you will have to um paste uh as per your unique whatever web URL is and then in the response body what you have to do is make sure that the device serial over here is the serial number of the actual device which is already imported into a cmdb so once you put the device serial number you are and then hit send this will kind of send a dummy webhook data to your servicenow instance and you will be able to validate that this webbook alert actually worked or how it looks like all right so now um once you complete your import job you start seeing incidents in your service now you'll see that we have a table where you can see a list of incidents that are created along with their short descriptions um and they're called ID will be set as Meraki alerts the caller will be sent to Meraki alerts that's how you can distinguish that this is coming from the Meraki dashboard if you click into a particular incident uh you will also find more details that is linked to the incident along with the description that came with the alert and as part of version 1.3 release uh there is a new menu which contains logs and administrative shortcuts that will help you to quickly identify errors and get access to core application settings we also introduced an improved error logs to help understand common challenges with the integration sometimes it's not quite right with the setup details and it isn't always clear where the problem is coming from or what the error message means so we have improved the overall logging experience by using some human readable error messages and with explanations as to what might be going wrong in that so what's new in version 1.3 uh one of the most and very uh one of the very recent updates of service graph connector for Meraki is its compatibility with servicenows Utah release uh we know that Utah compatibility was something uh customers been asking us for a long time so finally it's here uh the most uh recent version is version 1.3.3 and this version includes Utah certifications for the graph connector there are some UI changes to the navigation there are improvements for the import job which addresses some of the timeout issues which some of our customers were facing previously and with in general with the version 1.3 push um we have introduced a more simplified and improved setup experience there are new cmdb sync filters based on specific Meraki organizations there are new custom pre and post scripts which you can adjust for data mapping as part of the import job uh there's a new administrative and debugging menu to assist with setup and more troubleshooting and as we talked about uh there are some enhanced service now security for receiving the Meraki webhook alerts so with that um there are some really good uh development related links uh that I have mentioned over here uh we if you are interested in a setup guide and configuration for service now uh you can find that again on meraki.io uh you can also go out and check our developer home page for more insights around Meraki apis if you are interested in any learning Labs or sandbox environment or even any automation code repositories and there's a lot more to go and look around there we would also encourage you to join our Meraki Community uh it's like a forum of all the customers and partners who come and contribute their ask questions and share their experiences and if you're interested about learning more about how you can leverage webbook payload templates to customize them for some other applications in your environment uh I have posted the link for that as well so with that I would like now to pass on to Joe to talk about our Mirage ecosystem awesome thanks so much Twitter uh good morning good evening good afternoon everybody my name is Joe maestri I'm one of the ecosystem bdms here for uh those that didn't catch the intro earlier uh lots of really great information so really appreciate that and as far as my presentation goes today I'm going to talk a little bit about the ecosystem and how we're complementing the rocky portfolio and for all the servicenow customers that are leveraging Meraki how we can you know maximize your Roi with your Meraki and servicenow investment so with that being said I'm going to go ahead and uh go to the next slide here perfect so you all may be wondering what even is the ecosystem what's the marketplace and to make it super simple I'm sure everybody on this call today dialed in Via an iPhone or an Android device uh I'm team iPhone by the way and as we all know these devices are really awesome out of the box just like Meraki and servicenow and really how do we make these devices better well we go to the App Store the Google Play Store we download the tick tocks the Amazons twitters you name it all these different types of applications to make our lives better and really what we're doing with that is we are creating a Marketplace or an app store um for Meraki and services now is one of our top performing applications and what we really want to do is tell you the story about what we're doing with Meraki servicenow and the rest of our ecosystem Partners out there and how we could tie this all together with apis and automation uh to make your lives and your day-to-days a whole lot easier uh next slide here and if you're leveraging the Meraki platform which again I'm assuming everybody on this call today is uh you can extract a whole bunch of valuable information from each of the infrastructures so the Meraki cameras access points switches sensors security appliances and really get real business value out of these infrastructures uh to do things like automation machine learning uh personalized marketing Advanced video analytics all of those types of things uh and really automate those processes with servicenow and Meraki together and this is the real value of leveraging apis today with the Meraki portfolio next slide I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty and we can always focus on this at another time or a more uh one-on-one call with each and every one of you uh we have six different apis today and how you want to leverage them is something that we can have a conversation about uh again on a one-to-one basis but just laying the foundation for what we're doing on our back end with the Meraki apis next slide here some of the popular business outcomes that we're hearing on a day-to-day basis revolves around capturing new Revenue cost savings reducing risk and improving the customer and Patron experience and really what we've been focusing on the past few um quarters oh looks like there's someone came off mute there perfect um we've been focusing a lot around loss prevention and sustainability so again uh what we're here to do is just get your feet wet with the art of what is possible with the Meraki apis with servicenow and Meraki and again feel free to ask any questions after this or reach out to us one-on-one to discuss a little bit further how we can optimize your day-to-day and whatever you're looking to accomplish from a business perspective next slide here oh uh there we go and what that really looks like with the risk of sounding like an influencer feel free to scan the QR code on the screen uh to learn more about what we're doing within our marketplace with servicenow Meraki and the rest of our ecosystem Partners what that looks like to date is we have 170 plus Partners out there so 170 uh plus unique Partnerships uh with different organizations out there we could solve pretty much any use case or business problem with 275 plus applications we're growing each and every day 50 solution categories and really whatever you need as it relates to a business outcome or use case feel free to reach out to your account managers on this call myself schweda and we're happy to help create a turnkey application for you going forward um and I think there's one more slide here yes so in conclusion feel free to reach out ecosystem meraki.com and we're happy to field any questions or just hop on a one-to-one call to figure out how we can help you going forward so I'll go ahead and turn it back over to you sure thank you thank you Joe amazing information uh BS as Joe said feel free to I can actually get those QR code again up on the screen and feel free to scan this if you are interested in looking into any of our ecosystem partner Solutions or developer documentation or anything if you have any questions you can reach out to us at ecosystem.com again all these links and the recording will be shared with you after the event so don't worry if you didn't catch up on anything and yes um use uh this servicenow slide to accelerate value and further your goals with some of the resources that are shared by the servicenow team here if you have any questions I can see a lot of q a already coming in and uh yeah answered uh feel free to just keep them coming in and if you want you can reach out to us after the event as well feel free to reach out to us via our developer Community or just uh you know reaching out to us via emails that we provided here and with that thank you very much thank you everyone for attending uh I hope the session was useful uh we would really like to have your feedback and let us know what you think about the application and what are some new things that you would like to see in this thank you everyone have a nice day