Cisco Meraki / Catalyst / ACI & Multi-vendor Controller AIops

Fabric AIops

Audit availability: Real writes require a committed pending audit row and stop before contacting the platform if storage is unavailable. Reads and previews may continue with a warning; new audit rows store outcome summaries rather than full responses.

Disclaimer: Community-maintained open-source project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Cisco, Meraki, Arista, Ubiquiti, or any network-controller vendor. "Cisco", "Meraki", "Catalyst", "DNA Center", "Arista", "CloudVision", "Ubiquiti", "UniFi", "ACI", "APIC" and all product/trademark names belong to their respective owners. MIT licensed.

Governed AI-ops for network fabrics managed through a controller — the Cisco Meraki Dashboard API (the reference platform, full read + write), Cisco Catalyst Center (formerly DNA Center; read subset), Arista CloudVision Portal (CVP) (read subset), and UniFi Network (self-hosted controller or UniFi OS console; read subset + device restart), plus read-only Cisco ACI (APIC) endpoint path reconstruction and faults — with a built-in governance harness: unified audit log, token/runaway budget guard, undo-token recording, and descriptive risk tiers. Multi-platform by construction: a registry keyed by platform maps every canonical operation onto each controller's REST API (path templates + response adapters), so adding a controller is a registry entry, never new ops/CLI/MCP surface. An operation a platform doesn't map returns a clear teaching error ("not supported on X yet — open an issue"), never a silent no-op. No platform has yet been exercised against a live controller by this tool; the ACI reads are the one part built from real controller responses (anonymized APIC payloads a production user supplied) — see docs/VERIFICATION.md.

What it does

Three flagship signature analyses, plus the guarded reads and writes around them:

• Uplink loss & latency RCA — pull MX WAN uplink loss + latency across an org, rank the worst uplinks by a composite of average loss and latency, and map each degraded uplink to a likely cause + recommended action. Every ranking carries its numbers, not a black-box verdict.
• Network health score — a composite 0-100 score per network from device online %, uplink health %, and an alert-severity penalty (weighted 0.5/0.3/0.2), with every component returned so the number is explainable.
• Config template drift — for networks bound to a config template, list the settings that have drifted from the template (expected vs actual).

What works

• CLI (fabric-aiops ...): init, overview, org, network, device, client, health, aci, remediate, secret, doctor, mcp.
• MCP server (fabric-aiops mcp or fabric-aiops-mcp): 37 tools (28 read, 9 write), every one wrapped with the bundled @governed_tool harness.
• Encrypted credentials: the controller secret (Meraki API key / Catalyst Center or APIC username:password / CVP service-account token / UniFi API key) lives in an encrypted store ~/.fabric-aiops/secrets.enc (Fernet + scrypt) — never plaintext on disk. Unlock with a master password from FABRIC_AIOPS_MASTER_PASSWORD (MCP/CI) or an interactive prompt (CLI).
• Reversibility: mutating writes fetch the real before-state first and record a faithful inverse (update_device/update_network_vlan restore prior values; claim↔remove; bind↔unbind/rebind). Irreversible ops (reboot_device, blink_device_leds) record the prior state for audit but declare no undo.
• Safety: every state-changing CLI op supports --dry-run and requires double confirmation; every write MCP tool takes a dry_run preview.

Capability matrix (37 MCP tools)

network_health_score and config_template_drift are injected-only (they score data you already hold); uplink_loss_and_latency_rca accepts injected records for offline analysis or pulls live from a configured target. Device models carry a product-type prefix: MX appliance, MS switch, MR wireless AP, MV camera, MG cellular gateway.

Platform support matrix

One tool, five controller platforms. For the four in the table below the ops/CLI/MCP surface is identical everywhere; each platform maps the canonical operations it supports and raises a teaching error for the rest ("not supported on <platform> yet — open an issue or PR"). ACI maps none of these — see Cisco ACI below.

Concept mapping: canonical organizations/networks are Catalyst Center sites, CVP containers, and UniFi sites (the canonical id is the site's short name — the /api/s/{site}/ path segment); all have one global tree, so the org scope does not filter their lists. On unifi, device-scoped calls (device get / switch_ports / reboot) fill the site from the target's default org_id — set it in config.yaml (or the init wizard). Writes are Meraki-only except UniFi device restart — Catalyst Center and CVP change models (task/configlet workflows) don't map cleanly onto these canonical writes, so each write fails fast with a teaching error before any controller call (never a silent no-op). CVP config-drift surfaces through device_inventory (complianceCode/complianceIndication per device) and network_alerts (events); configlet-content retrieval and deep pagination on catalyst/cvp/unifi are known deferrals.

Cisco ACI (APIC)

ACI has two axes — tenant → VRF → bridge domain → EPG, and pod → node → interface — and neither is an organization → network → device tree. Rather than make every network_id mean something different per call, an aci target answers the canonical tools with a teaching error and gets three read-only ACI-native tools that take ACI references (MAC/IP, tenant/app/EPG names, DNs):

How to read them:

• A static reconstruction, not a reachability test. staticPathResolved: true means the fabric is configured to carry the endpoint, not that traffic flows. Nothing is written to the APIC and no troubleshooting session is created.
• Links follow the relation APIC resolved (tDn), so cross-tenant links into common are followed; a relation that is not formed is a finding with its state.
• Related faults are candidates matched by DN (the EPG, the attachment interface, the leaf's deployed copy of the EPG's policy) — proximity, not cause.
• Fault rows are records, not incidents: a delegated record mirrors a fault on another object. A cleared fault keeps the description it had when raised.
• Not evaluated (listed in every result as notChecked): vzAny contracts, taboo contracts, imported contract interfaces, preferred-group peers, service graphs / L3Out.

Leaf/spine inventory and interface state (fabricNode, topSystem, l1PhysIf) are not in this release — they will be built once real responses for those classes are available, as the ones above were.

Per-platform auth

fabric-aiops init walks through the platform choice and stores the right kind of secret; fabric-aiops doctor probes each target with the canonical top-of-hierarchy read (organizations / sites / containers / UniFi sites; on an APIC, the tenant count), exercising the full auth flow.

What this tool does, and does not, decide

It delivers network-fabric operations — reads and writes — accurately and efficiently, and records every one of them. It does not decide whether a write is allowed to happen. That is the agent's judgement, or the permission of the account you connect it with: give it a Meraki API key whose admin has read-only organization access (or the read-only equivalent on your controller) and the writes fail at the controller — the place that actually owns the permission.

So there is no read-only switch, no policy file, no approval gate to configure. The one thing the tool guarantees is that nothing is silent: every call, over MCP and over the CLI alike, lands an audit row in ~/.fabric-aiops/audit.db, and mutating writes still capture their before-state and record an inverse where one exists.

Each tool declares a risk_level, kept in agreement with its [READ]/[WRITE] documentation tag by a test, and carried into the audit row as a descriptive tier — so a reviewer can see at a glance that a row was a high-risk delete. It is a label, not a gate.

Quick start

As a Claude Code plugin

One install gives an agent both the skill and the MCP server:

/plugin marketplace add AIops-tools/marketplace/plugin install fabric-aiops@aiops-tools

The MCP server is fetched with uv and pinned to the package version this plugin declares, so an audit row can be traced back to the code that wrote it. Credentials are still configured with fabric-aiops init — see below.

As an OpenClaw plugin

The same bundle is published on ClawHub, where one install delivers the skill and its MCP server together:

openclaw plugins install clawhub:@zw008/fabric-aiopsopenclaw skills info fabric-aiops          # expect: Visible to model: yes

Restart the OpenClaw gateway afterwards so it loads the plugin. The MCP server is fetched with uv, pinned to this exact release, so uvx has to be on PATH — without it the skill still installs but reports Visible to model: no. Credentials are configured exactly as below.

As a CLI or standalone MCP server

uv tool install fabric-aiops              # or: pipx install fabric-aiopsfabric-aiops init                         # wizard: choose platform (meraki/catalyst/cvp/unifi) + store the secret (encrypted)fabric-aiops doctor                       # verify config, secrets, connectivity (per-platform auth probe)fabric-aiops overview                     # one-shot fabric fleet healthfabric-aiops health uplink-rca            # rank worst MX WAN uplinks + cause/action (meraki)fabric-aiops device inventory --model MS  # switches in the org

Run as an MCP server (stdio):

export FABRIC_AIOPS_MASTER_PASSWORD=...   # unlock secrets non-interactivelyfabric-aiops-mcp

Where that password then lives: an exported variable is readable by every process this shell starts and is recorded by shell history. On a shared or long-lived host, prefer the interactive prompt, or inject it from a secret manager for the life of the one command that needs it.

Governance

Every operation — MCP and CLI — passes through the bundled @governed_tool harness. It records; it does not authorize (see above).

• Audit — every call (params, outcome summary, status, duration, risk tier, and any operator-supplied approver/rationale) is logged to ~/.fabric-aiops/audit.db (relocatable via FABRIC_AIOPS_HOME). The CLI writes the same row the MCP path does — there is no unaudited entry point.
• Runaway guard — a safety backstop, not an authorization gate: the same call hammered in a tight loop trips a circuit breaker so a stuck agent can't burn unbounded calls/time. Disable with FABRIC_RUNAWAY_MAX=0; optional hard ceilings via FABRIC_MAX_TOOL_CALLS / FABRIC_MAX_TOOL_SECONDS.
• Undo recording — reversible writes record an inverse descriptor built from the fetched before-state.
• Risk tier — a descriptive label on the audit row derived from risk_level; it gates nothing.

Scope

This is the network-fabric / controller member of the AIops-tools family (governed AI-ops with audit + budget + undo + risk tiers). Do NOT use it for OT / industrial edge (Modbus, OPC-UA, PROFINET) — see the separate industrial-aiops line — nor for device-level CLI/SSH network automation.

Missing a capability?

Coverage is intentionally a curated subset of each controller's API. Missing a call or a device family on Meraki? A ❌ in the support matrix you need on Catalyst Center, CloudVision Portal, or UniFi Network (writes included — e.g. the UniFi cookie-login fallback for pre-9.0 controllers)? Want another controller platform entirely? Open an issue or PR — contributions welcome (a platform is a single descriptor module: path templates + response adapters).

Status

No platform has yet been exercised by this tool against a live Meraki organization, Catalyst Center appliance, CloudVision Portal instance, UniFi controller or APIC. The first four platforms' API paths are modelled from the public API shapes and tested against mocks. The ACI reads are tested against real, anonymized APIC responses from a production fabric (endpoint, EPG, bridge domain, VRF, contract, filter entry, faults) and their query mechanics against Cisco's own SDK — but a live run of this tool against an APIC is still outstanding. docs/VERIFICATION.md defines the checklist a live run must cover; fabric-aiops doctor is the fastest live check.