CIsco Meraki dashboard by HTTP Issue

[Clifra Jones]

I have a bit of a unique (maybe) issue with the discovery in this template.
When trying to create the hosts for the Meraki Devices we get the following type of error:

Cannot create host "East-VA-Upper Saddle River / Tax Office-Switch #2": name contains invalid character '/'.
We get this for multiple special characters in device names.
It's not practical to change these names as our Operations group manages most of these devices for our field offices and they will just do this again when new devices are deployed as Meraki allows these characters in device names.
Is there any way in the discovery process to replace invalid characters with say "_" when creating the host objects?

[cyber]

Probably.. preprocessing. Run your json through JS and in case of some specific keys do the replacement in value... Or add another key with modified value...

[sfuller]

Clifra,

Did you end up coming up with any JS or some other way of sorting this issue out?

[Clifra Jones]

Clifra,

Did you end up coming up with any JS or some other way of sorting this issue out?

We just ended up changing the names in the dashboard as there were only a few.

You'd have to modify the GetData item in Cisco Meraki dashboard by HTTP.
In this section you would have to do a string replace

if (!organization_devices[j].name) {     
      organization_devices[j].name = organization_devices[j].serial;
} else {
    organization_device.Name = organization_device.name.replace("/", "_");
}

We ended up not using this template for a few reason.
We have a very large national network and we kept running into API limits and then overloading the Zabbix server.
I am sure I could have tuned the server to prevent the overload but I could not get around the API limits. (we had the same problem with the "AWS by HTTP" template.)

The Meraki Dashboard does a good job of monitoring your network. You just have to setup alerting. We determined it was not worth the effort to use Zabbix.

[sfuller]

We just ended up changing the names in the dashboard as there were only a few.

Thanks for the reply. Hopefully the API limits won't affect us. After my post, I dug into this after bit of reading and some caffeine and ended up with something similar to clean up the device and org names. I ended up using the MAC address for unnamed devices since that is what the Meraki dashboard did.

The biggest issue for us, due to how we are organizing devices/customers was getting the dicovered devices into the appropriate host groups. I looked a solution that someone suggested for a similar issue that injected a user macro into the json so we could set an LLD macro to the value we wanted, and use that for a group prototype.

[Asfanbaloch]

Have you explored whether the discovery template has any customizable options or rules that allow for pre-processing or sanitization of host names during the creation process?