Meraki Dashboard Reviews

The tool's main use case for our logistics company is to manage our global network infrastructure. Employees can connect from any part of the world.

We greatly utilize the network because we can plug it into the DNS, VPN, or equipment. It's very good. Meraki Dashboard enhances wireless network management. We appreciate its flexibility, as it allows for easy suite configuration. We can handle everything on there when there's a policy or any other requirement.

The tool's real-time monitoring capabilities are good. My experience with the mobile application management features of the Meraki Dashboard has been positive. Recently, a customer raised concerns about excessive bandwidth consumption in their network due to equipment connected to the Meraki dashboard. We quickly identified a new MAC address consuming bandwidth by enabling monitoring within the Meraki dashboard. Within minutes, we could pinpoint the issue and take necessary actions, such as limiting bandwidth or blocking the IP or MAC address from the network.

The tool needs to incorporate more integration platforms. Integrating technical support features directly into the dashboard would be highly beneficial. This would allow technicians to troubleshoot issues more efficiently. 

I have been using the product for seven years. 

I rate the tool's stability a ten out of ten. 

I rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten. 

The tool's deployment is not complex. The deployment process involved assessing the requirements, obtaining necessary permissions for network access, and proceeding with the installation and configuration.

Meraki Dashboard's pricing is reasonable. It is sold yearly, typically for one, three, or five years. I rate its pricing a five out of ten. 

I rate the overall product a ten out of ten. I recommend considering Meraki Dashboard as it offers high security, stability, flexibility, and reasonable pricing.

We use this solution as management software for the Meraki hardware appliances. This allows us to manage the network infrastructure over the platform.

We like the visibility this solution gives us of the infrastructure.

This solution can be quite complicated to configure and manage, unless you have a technical person with specific knowledge working on it.

We have been working with this solution for around eight years.

We have found this to be a stable solution.

As this solution is cloud-based it is easily scalable.

We would rate this solution a six out of ten.

I'm a consultant. When a customer moves buildings, I help them understand what they're going to need for the new building. We put them in touch with all the right companies that can help put that together.

This solution is usually deployed in the cloud.

Meraki provides the most features. It's helpful to be able to see that your network is online. Something I love about Meraki is on all the Meraki switches in the dashboard, you can see what their current data transfer rates are, and you can run cable tests from it. We've used the cable test function numerous times. It's fantastic.

One of the things we love about Meraki is that we work a lot with audio visual systems for new buildings. We find that Meraki has all the features you need to be able to enable complex network protocols for AV equipment. We deal with a streaming product over IP, and Meraki is fantastic at that. With wireless presentation, you can set Bonjour and mDNS replication really easily on your wireless network and have it traverse different VLANs and different wireless servers. It's fabulous, but you have to know how to do it.

It's a very complex system. Customers have told me that sometimes there are lots of advanced features that are available and that you can change in the dashboard, but sometimes it's very hard to know what they are. It would be very helpful if next to a lot of the settings, they had a button you could click on, and it would explain what that setting actually does and how it affects your network.

Particularly when you're in the dashboard and particularly when you're looking at wireless networks, they have so many advanced options and they're hard to understand. A lot of people don't know what beacon intervalling is or even basic things like channels. 

Meraki has good documentation on their website, but if it was better linked with the dashboard, it would make it a lot simpler. Small businesses that we deal with use Ubiquiti. In their dashboard, next to every setting you can see what that setting does, which is really helpful. DrayTek is like that as well.

We always employ a third party who knows the system inside and out. If you apply it yourself, it would take you forever. From my perspective, that would be the number one thing I would want to see improved as a high-level person, because it would save us a lot of money if we didn't have to employ a third party.

I have been using this solution since before it was purchased by Cisco.

I would give technical support an 8 out of 10. It's very good. We're very lucky. There are a couple of people who are based in Australia who are part of Meraki support, and they're easy to get a hold of and very helpful.

The reason I would mark them down by two points is that sometimes the system is a little bit automated, so it's hard to get to the person you want to talk to. They probably need more support staff, like with most companies. The response time can be a little bit slow sometimes.

Initial setup is very complex.

Every time we've deployed it, we've had to employ third parties to do it for us.

My view is that it's expensive, but it's the best.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

Every time we've deployed it, it's fantastic. It works great. You just have to understand that it's complex, but all systems are complex. Palo Alto is complex, Arista is complex, Extreme Networks is complex.

I would never recommend Meraki to someone who only has 100 users. They would need to have 300 users. For a small number of users, it's expensive, it's complex, and you really need to be able to afford to pay someone who knows how to use it. If you have 300 users, you can have a full-time network engineer.

If you want the best and you have the money, then get it.

The primary use is to have centralized control over all the Meraki devices and services on your network. Primarily I use it for security configuration and reporting.  

Very intuitive, complete overview of entire network including branch offices. Ability to drill down into events and alerts and lookup in the knowledge-base. Create tickets and track them.

I think that the most valuable part about the dashboard is the analytics. A firm that I was doing some IT consulting work for was hit with a ransomware attack and this thing was amazing. After we got things cleaned up, we found that the actors had some IP numbers somewhere on the West Coast. They started to try to get back into the network and Meraki was there to say, "You know what? This same malicious IP number is knocking at your door again." We were able to take care of that and block them off so they could not access the network and that problem was put to rest.

The biggest problem is the absence of a VPN client like AnyConnect with the device. The Meraki rep that I dealt with actually agreed. He said a lot of people are complaining about the fact that they had to work with a separate VPN.  

Here is the problem. Let's say you have got to deploy and install a VPN client on 50 workstations. You physically have to go to every one of the 50 workstations and do the VPN deployment manually. You can not just push it out through an email or a group policy. That means you have to touch every machine and configure it based on the type of network card it has and make a whole bunch of other settings.  

Manually deploying the VPN is about a 20-minute procedure and that is after you learn how to do it. By comparison, if I wanted to roll out 1000 VPN clients with a normal Cisco device, the Cisco AnyConnect software can be just pushed out with some easy instructions and away you go.  

I think the VPN client is really the only true issue I had with the product itself. The connection that I get from home is sometimes a little shaky when I have to use it remotely, but it is impossible to put the blame on that connection as due to Meraki.  

I have been using this product for about a year.  

We never had any issues at all with the stability of Meraki. It is self-healing. If the power goes out or whatever, it is very good at handling that kind of issue. It is easy to learn, easy to read the reports, and it is easy to use the dashboard.  

I had worked with Fortinet and some other firewalls — Linksys of course, going all the way back to the old WatchGuard. I think Meraki really kicked off the whole cloud-based managed device movement and everyone else is just hopping on to do the same kind of thing. SonicWall and Fortinet and all the other newer competitors just followed along when they figured it was something valuable. If Meraki could get their VPN sorted out, I think they would have themselves a flagship product that was really the leader of the pack.  

I have not really had the opportunity to test the scalability first-hand. We were are a small office, so I never really got a chance to try and add hundreds of users. If that had been the case, Meraki probably would have suggested that we go to the next model up because we needed a more robust system.

The configuration of the VPN between branche offices was wonderful. You just click on the address and it basically does everything itself. For a non-engineer type person, pretty much anybody in IT can configure these things once you do the webinar. It is easy and intuitive and as far as I have been able to work with the scalability, I think a lot of the product.  

When I did get to engage the technical support people at Meraki, I would give them a 10-out-of-10. The technical support was great.  

I have been working with firewalls for a long time. I worked with the Cisco 5500 series. I worked with a lot of their older stuff back in the day. Mostly my job for the previous 10 years was not to be the supplier and was not the implementer. Rather I was more of a consultant, so I never really had the opportunity to get the hands-on experience I have now.  

The setup had a few different stages to take care of. The first step was to create a VPN, a branch office connection, and then a better sister location. I bought another MX to act as a backup, so we had that configured as a hot spot or a failover. Then I configured the VPN so that users would be able to work from home. That VPN configuration is probably the one thing that I did not much like about the product. It almost makes no sense that it does not have its own VPN client. You have to use the Microsoft VPN client, which is a bit of a pain. If it has to be that way there surely has to be a better way to integrate it.  

With the main Cisco stuff, you just download the VPN client and it has got your anti-virus component and your VPN client. That is just not the case with Meraki. I know they have been talking about trying to work that out and get that installed. Right now it is a sorta major glitching point.  

I did not configure the product originally. Somebody else did it and they did not configure it very well. For example, there is a feature to protect against ransomware and that feature was not even turned on in the device. After I realized it was not working optimally, I got together with the Meraki folks and they got in there and reconfigured it. It became a true AI device at that point. There were really a lot of things wrong with the initial configuration, but that ransomware piece was a pretty major feature to miss.  

After Meraki helped me reconfigure everything, I felt much more comfortable after that. It was done by one of their resellers and I guess I should have gone that way out of the gate.  

For a small MX 64, it is maybe $300 to $400 a year. It is nothing really outrageous. I was originally put off that you had to pay for a subscription, but I am a veteran thinking back 10 years ago when there was no such thing as subscriptions. Now just about everything seems to be going that route.  

I could see a firewall device and that is sort of comforting. I do not agree with the solution being like a switch and virtually invisible. Like you could have a switch-up in the ceiling somewhere that nobody knows is there. Then all of a sudden it gets tripped and just stops working. You don't see a device go down. But again, it is not just Meraki that is going with the subscription scheme. It is also other companies like SonicWall. They are all going to subscription-based licensing.  

For small businesses, I would recommend Meraki over pretty much anything else on the market.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is worst and ten is the best, I would rate Meraki Dashboard as an eight-out-of-ten.  

In my previous employment, I used to deploy Meraki solutions for retail stores. They really liked the the Presence analytics feature. Basically, they could tell how many clients came into each store and how many clients came out, using the MAC addresses, not some kind of analog solution. So not only could they know how many clients came in and came out, but also how many returning customers came to each location. They could take that data and match it up with the other locations, and get a lot of marketing information from that too.

In addition to Presence analytics, Layer 7 filtering allowed me to filter connectivity by service and not by port. Also Easy VPN connectivity between the Merakis, multiple SSID configurations, plus I could segregate one SSID from another. One more feature I would add is Facebook integration. 

It improved the marketing solution of the company where I deployed it and it improved the way they gather marketing data tremendously. Instead of sending emails to customers with their old access-point solution, each client that came into the store - by checking into the store, they could connect right away to Wi-Fi - the store could get a lot of the social media data from their clients. That's how they got automatic marketing going, by the clients checking into Facebook. So their friends could see right away their check-ins, and so on.

It's funny, because these are solutions that are more in the marketing area rather than the network, but there's no other solution that provides this.

The process of getting licensing can be a little bit painful, especially if you're doing it each year. The customer support could also take a while to get on the line.

I'd say around five years.

No issues with stability. It was good. Once I deployed it, I totally forgot about it. It did its job, network-wise.

I would say it's about a seven out of 10.

Previously we used a different solution that only offered the ability to get emails from customers, and this provided a much better solution for a retail environment.

Simple.

Merkaki was there before I was hired, and I'm the one who took it and presented it to my supervisor. From there, I went and presented it to the company where I deployed it. It was a great story. It was only after about two weeks at my new job back then, I brought the solution to my company, and then I sold the solution, configured the solution, designed the solution, and maintained the solution day-to-day. So it was something that I did my own research on.

Look at all the features it has to offer, not only network-wise. For example, the Meraki MR12 is an excellent solution for retail, and you also have a Meraki that has great switches where you can control everything over the cloud, and so on. There are different features that fit well so I'd recommend looking into everything it has to offer, and all the solutions.

I give it a 10 out of 10 because I don't see any other product in the market that offers the same solutions, at least for retail.

I'm doing everything with this solution. I'm renting some access and using it for my enterprise. I'm doing the insights. I'm doing the API integration with the NordLayer. I can work from home with it as well. 

For the most part, it's perfect. The features are all great.

The initial setup is very good.

It's a scalable solution.

The solution is stable. 

It is a little bit expensive. 

Maybe sometimes they just need to add some more integration to not be a hundred percent Cisco. For example, with Cisco Umbrella, if they could integrate, let's say, Palo Alto or some other third-party devices on the API, not on the VPN channel, that would be great.

Some features could be added. 

I've used the solution for around two years.

The solution is very stable and reliable. There are no bugs. Its performance is good. 

I've found the solution to be scalable. 

The number of users vary. 

For my company, I'm providing consultancy. That's around ten people. However, for other companies where we provide the consultant, there's sometimes 2,000, or 5,000 people. I cannot distinguish between my business as a small enterprise doing that consultancy or in general our clients. It's hard to give exact user numbers.

I didn't face any real problems that would require support. Maybe some other people might if they are doing things on their own side.

Sometimes, with the old way of Meraki VPN connection, it did not work on Windows. However, I asked somebody to follow up with customer support or with technical support and we worked out the issue.

I'm using the Cisco Meraki right now for my own business. In my company, we are using FortiGate. 

The setup is easy. It's not complex. It could be more friendly. When we connect on the API, maybe we can add some more features. Other than that, it was great.

I don't have a huge environment, to be honest. If I have a big environment, I would automate that. I'm doing everything manually in a small environment, and it's straightforward and fast.

The amount of people you need to maintain the solution depends on the third party. Our monitoring or support will be two or three people. However, usually, maintenance is handled by a third party. We don't consider how many people; we do the fees, and they will do their job.

I handle the initial setup in-house. I did not need the assistance of other outside individuals such as consultants or integrators. 

Of course, the last time I deployed around 1200 sites and I used a third party.

While we haven't seen any ROI just yet, we expect to see an ROI in three to four years. 

It is a pretty expensive solution. I'd rate it four out of five in terms of how expensive it is, with five being the most expensive. 

There is just the licensing fee and the integration. If I do it with the Cisco Umbrella, since I'm forced to use the Umbrella to get the full features, I'm limited with the Umbrella. That said, I don't want, as an example, a SaaS solution. If I do it with NordVPN or any other SaaS solution, I have to pay there, and I do a VPN connection which is not the right solution for me in 2022. 

We're a customer and an end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution. However, I don't know the exact version number. 

I'd advise users that the solution can be expensive, and they need to brace for that.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We use Meraki Dashboard for troubleshooting and configuring networks, statistics, reporting, and monitoring security threats. Our clients' networks depend on it daily, and it's part of our core business model.

We can remotely monitor clients' networks through Meraki Dashboard, dramatically reducing the on-site visits required. Meraki Dashboard has cut down on personnel costs because it requires fewer people to support. 

It also helps us stay on top of potential problems, which keeps our clients happy. We get critical notifications ahead of time, so we know about the issues before our clients do.

The most critical feature of Meraki Dashboard is its scalability.

Meraki Dashboard is a mature product, so it doesn't have a lot of bugs or significant issues, but would love to have the ability to save configurations externally instead of storing them in the database. 

I've been using Meraki Dashboard for over four years.

Meraki Dashboard is stable. We rarely have significant crashes or downtime. The solution has gone down maybe once in four years.

Scalability is one of Meraki Dashboard's strongest features. We have thousands of users if we're counting the end-users on our clients' network, but we have hundreds of clients. 

The wait time to speak with a Meraki support engineer is always long, but they get the job done. I rate Meraki support eight out of 10. 

Positive

We never based our business on other cloud solutions of that level. We use other products, but I hated the HP solution. There were so many glitches. Unfortunately, we have to deal with it from time to time because of existing clients, but that's not what I would recommend to anybody.

I rate Meraki Dashboard eight out of 10 for ease of deployment. It's straightforward to deploy Meraki Dashboard at a new site because you can use a template, and it's easy for me, in particular, because I have been using the solution for a long time. 

With a template, it usually takes no longer than 10 minutes if you have all the network equipment ready to go. A full setup from scratch takes about two days. Usually, a single person can set it up but it depends on the number of clients we have. If we have more clients, we might need additional staff to manage and maintain the solution. 

We do the deployment ourselves.

I rate Meraki Dashboard six out of 10 for affordability. The cost depends on the amount of equipment at each site, including switches, access points, firewalls, etc. Meraki's licensing model is per unit per year. At a minimum, it's around $500 for the smallest networks.

I rate Meraki Dashboard nine out of 10. It's one of the best products on the market, but there's always room for improvement. More convenient licensing and faster technical support would probably bring it up to a perfect 10. 

If you plan to implement Meraki Dashboard, I recommend first creating a structure that you can replicate. It's much easier to support that way because there's already an internal structure. If you have consistency in naming devices, ports, etc., it will help you search data to identify ports and troubleshoot.

We use Meraki Dashboard to manage all our Cisco Meraki network equipment, SD-WAN, firewalls, DHCP, routers, switches, etc. We have firewalls at three locations, and each site has about 200 users.  

Meraki Dashboard centralizes control of all our equipment into one cloud-based console, so we can manage it from anywhere. We can resolve problems remotely outside of business hours because it is on the cloud. You can use the dashboard to change security settings or configure routers and switches. 

Meraki Dashboard could improve integration with non-Cisco platforms. 

I have used Meraki Dashboard for about seven years.

Meraki Dashboard is stable. 

It isn't hard to set up Meraki Dashboard if you have some experience with Cisco solutions. You need some knowledge about networks and firewall rules. We just followed the manual. 

I rate Meraki Dashboard 10 out of 10. It's the best solution.