Posts Tagged ‘location’

Updates to the Meraki location API

All Meraki wireless products offer out–of–the–box, easy to use location features as part of  Cisco’s location analytics technology, Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX). With CMX location analytics it’s possible to determine important business metrics such as how many people enter your location, how long they stay, and how frequently they visit.

cmx_api_location_graph

Adding no additional cost, thanks to the Meraki all-inclusive licensing model, this data has become available to many organizations that could not typically justify deploying when there was an additional cost. This has led to innovative uses of the location data that has enabled smart city initiatives, and allowed educators to understand student movements.

An important component of empowering this creative use of CMX location analytics was the release of an Application Programming Interface (API). This lets organizations have access to the raw data used by the Meraki dashboard. With access to the raw data there are some major benefits. The first is that no data is summarized and full device identities are included, facilitating lookup by other applications, like CRM. The second is that the data is provided offered with only a short delay between it being created and presented to the API.

cmx_api_enablement

Thus the API allows for highly advanced software systems to be developed that are location and identity aware. User identity can be linked to devices, location awareness becomes bound only by the geographical dispersion of your access points (AP), and software systems can make decisions within a time span that is relevant to a device’s location.

One of the downsides of providing raw data is that it can be complex to manipulate for the application developer. For this reason, the engineering team at Meraki developed a second generation API and open source example code. The version two CMX API can be selected in the Meraki dashboard and offers X,Y coordinates and latitude and longitude values. With the first API, radio signal strength values are provided for trilateration of a devices location. Further details on what is available in the API can be found in the documentation here.

cmx_api_example_app

To hear more about the development of the location API, and possible uses of the source code, then you can do so by listening to the above podcast with George Bentinck (Solutions Architect) and Nathan (Member of Meraki technical staff).

 

If you are interested in building an application with Meraki location information, then it is worth checking out our example code on GitHub here. This provides a great way of getting started with the CMX API and can form the base of your future projects. You can try an application based on this code, with live data from the Meraki offices in San Francisco, by following this link, or by viewing example output data here.

Interested in Location Services? Join us Friday for a live demo.

Many of you have expressed interest in our new Location Services, which allow enterprise customers to determine the location of WiFi clients without additional hardware.  We’re therefore holding a quick, informal webinar on Friday, during which we’ll talk a bit about how this feature works under the covers, do a live demo, and hold Q&A.  The webinar runs just 15 minutes, so it’s a great quick way to learn about this new feature.  You can register (for free, of course) here.

We hope you will join us!

Where In the World Are Your Clients? Now You Know!

When you get a call from a wireless user complaining about connectivity problems, what is one of the first questions you might ask?  “Where are you exactly?”  Knowing precisely where a user is located can be immensely helpful in diagnosing and troubleshooting issues.  What AP are they associated to?  Are they behind a pillar that could be blocking their wireless signal?  Are they in an area of a new building where the network is currently being expanded and might still have some coverage weak spots?  This knowledge can often provide an administrator with a good idea of where they should dig in to properly troubleshoot the issue.

Starting today, administrators of Meraki Enterprise networks won’t have to ask where a client is because they’ll know: introducing Meraki Location-Based Services.  On each client details page you’ll notice a new map where the current location of the client is clearly indicated on either a Google map or building floorplan (see below screen shot).

In addition to troubleshooting client issues, there are many other situations where being able to pin down a client device’s location can be very useful to administrators, such as tracking down a lost laptop or monitoring a nurse’s progress doing rounds in a hospital with the medicine cart.  Typically these capabilities might require additional appliances and third-party software costing $10,000’s, but with Meraki they are provided with all Enterprise networks at no additional cost and without the need to deploy additional gear.

When combined with other Dashboard features like “remote hands” tools and detailed reporting with Traffic Shaper’s application-level visibility, Location-Based Services provides administrators with powerful tools to understand exactly how their network is being used and to quickly troubleshoot client issues remotely.  Please let us know what you think of this new feature using the Make a Wish box!