For most customers, the default way of integrating Meraki with ServiceNow is to use the ServiceNow Graph Collector for Meraki. This has the benefit of importing Organizations, Networks, Devices and Device statuses into the ServiceNow CMDB. Plus, it will also intercept webhook alerts and register the incidents within ServiceNow. For many, this functionality provides enough to get started and provide good service.
The problem with taking raw alert feeds from Meraki, is the amount of unneccessary alerts created. New tickets get created for every alert, and for every clear. And if a power supply fails, then the cascade of alerts can quickly overwhelm the ability of a service provider to meet SLAs.
The native SGC connector feeds a set of ‘standard’ metrics into ServiceNow. But the Meraki APIs provide a lot more information that remains untapped – and unavailable to the service desk to triage, identify and resolve the incident. As well as Devices, Networks and Organizations, additional data is available for Cameras, Cellular Gateways, Licensing, Sensors, Switches and other products.
Inserting intelligent middleware into your ServiceNow connector can provide big benefits. Not only can you now access all the data hidden behind the Meraki APIs – this information can be automatically added to every ticket creation. Additionally, de-duplication logic can prevent (for example) new tickets being created for alert clear events, or where a storm of alerts are generated caused by a single incident.
Leading service providers are now embracing this automation layer to develop their own playbooks, auto-remediating common incident types, auto-enabling problem management processes, and adding deep enrichment to ServiceNow tickets including syslog attach, or results of auto-triggered probe collectors.
Our solutions are modular, and can be deployed individually or together:
- AlertMagic for incident management
- Meraki DataMagic for monitoring and analytics
- ConnectMagic for CMDB synchronization