Running Naming Compliance audits with the Audit and Compliance tool

Learn how to quickly run naming compliance audits across all of your Cisco Meraki networks.

Written by Boundless Digital

Updated 3 years ago

Overview

When you manage large organizations, maintaining a coherent and organized naming structure becomes crucial to simplify day-to-day operations.

However, as your organization grows in size and complexity, you might find that it's getting more and more difficult to keep up the structure you initially established.

Boundless Audit and Compliance Naming helps you maintain naming conformity throughout the organization, and over time.

By using a Meraki API-based automation workflow, this tool allows you to easily audit and update your network and device naming structure.

As a result, you can ensure your organization stays correctly structured, so that you don't lose agility when running audits or batch configuration changes.

Follow this article to learn about how the Boundless Audit and Compliance Naming tool works.

Prerequisites

Initial setup
Before using the Boundless Audit and Compliance tool, you must have previously setup your Boundless account and synchronized the Boundless Platform with your Meraki organization.

Using the A&C Naming Tool

Step 1 | Select your Compliance rule set

On the Network Management Dashboard, click on the Audit and Compliance section.

Then, select what kind of rule set you want to create - in this case it will be a Naming rule set, but you can eventually choose amongst configurations or security rule sets.

Go ahead and tap on Name.

This will open an initial page, where you can find a summary of your previously deployed Naming Rule Sets, and also create new ones.

Note that if you are using the application for the first time, the summary will look empty.

Step 2 | Create a Naming rule set

Once on the Naming Panel, click on New rule set.

This will open an empty template which you can fill with your own naming structure parameters.

Rule set name
First of all, enter a name for your rule set.

We recommend you to be as specific as possible on your naming conventions.

For instance, you can use nomenclatures to easily track the deployed rule sets and quickly understand what each of them contains (what rules are applied, and to which resources).

This will save you some time in the long run.

Targets
Select the resource you'd like to audit. You can either select all networks, specific networks, devices, SSIDs, VLANs, or even Switch ports.
Define the naming rule set
The Audit and Compliance Naming rules include advanced operators that will help you granularly define your structure.

The following operators are included:

- Equals: The name should equal a specific value.

- Starts with: The name should start with a specific value.

- Ends with: The name should end with a specific value.

- Contains: The name should not contain a specific value.

- Not contains: The name should not contain a specific value.

- Match regex: Use your own regex formula to define a more granular custom-made rule.

- In list: The name should include any of the items included in the provided list.

For complex naming structures, you can choose to add an additional operator.
Your rule set will therefore be composed of two operators, both of which must be TRUE.

Save your Rule
Set Once your template is ready, click on Save Changes and go back to the initial page.

Step 3 | Run a Compliance audit

Once the Naming rule set is created the system will automatically audit your organization and alert you if any network isn't compliant with the new rule set.

The rule sets are a dynamic asset. This means that after deployed, they will continue to audit your Meraki organization and launch an alert when non-compliant changes take place.

When that happens, you can choose to update the resource name, or dismiss it.

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