The Dashboard API is likely the most powerful form of automation available for the Meraki platform due to its availability of options and ease of integration with external solutions.

As a result of how the Dashboard has been designed, nearly every action in the Dashboard can be performed through the use of the Dashboard API. In fact, many of the actions performed within the Dashboard UI utilize the same Dashboard API endpoints on the back end to perform the change. This design supports a nearly limitless range of interactions with the Dashboard through any custom solution that is able to use REST API to interact with the Meraki cloud platform.

With the use of the Dashboard API, the potential for automation of nearly any task with your solution of choice is only a few clicks away once API access to an organization has been configured. With the ability to either pull information down from the Dashboard or push changes back up, the Dashboard API can be used for basic data gathering and monitoring, similar to SNMP, where API requests are made out to the Meraki Cloud Controller to return either device or network statistics or current device or network configurations. However, the Dashboard API can also be used to enable powerful automation that can actively respond to changing conditions and push changes to the Dashboard in response to those conditions. The coming sections demonstrate just a few ways the Dashboard API can be used, covering several simple examples of automation that can be accomplished through the use of the API.

Pro Tip

API calls are rate limited to ten calls per second, per organization. Using Action Batches allows for combining of multiple API calls into a single call, helping to avoid rate-limiting issues.

Before the Dashboard API can be used, it must be enabled on a per-organization basis, then each account within each organization must generate its own unique API key for that organization. For accounts that have access to multiple organizations, API access must be individually enabled and configured for each organization, then the API keys must be generated for that account within each organization.