Meraki Dashboard Reviews

The primary use is with the Managed Service Provider Dashboard. I work for an ISP, and we provide Meraki solutions to our customers.

In terms of the operation side, the Meraki Dashboard has made it much easier to use and configure from one place. There are tools embedded in the dashboard to troubleshoot, instead of looking at various network elements, you just have the one dashboard to view everything.

The feature I find most valuable is the single pane of glass where you can configure a monitor view, all from one dashboard. For example, on the wireless side, you can configure it under the configuration panel, and then view statistics like location analytics, user analytics, etc.

The product can be improved around the captive portal portion. It may be helpful to have maybe some popups or blurbs that just guide you in terms of how to use it or explain what a certain input means. Also, for example, the summary dashboard is under Organization, instead of under Network and sometimes it gets confusing where to actually find the summary dashboard. 

For me, from a usability or user journey perspective, it can be a bit more intuitive. For example, I want to see the summary from my Network but I have to go to Organization. Also the guides: they are great, but it's very difficult to find user guides, specifically on how to use every single feature. If I have to draw up the user guide, it's quite difficult to find the content. And maybe something which is connected with the support, or the price, or something like that. Or functionality, like more features.

I find the stability of the Meraki Dashboard very reliable and stable. It's got the built-in mechanisms like warm spares, automatic solar, from my side, it's been very reliable. I've always been able to connect to the dashboard. There haven't been any outages. We haven’t had any stability issues.

In terms of scalability, we are planning to roll it out to the rest of our 400 stores. We've only got one solution that's live right now, which is a combination of their security appliance, which is an access point. For the Wi-Fi, many of the guests who come through the store are using it. The internal staff is using the Wi-Fi and the LAN. It's the store that sells our product, and they're using the full stack of Meraki right now.

The technical support that I've experienced so far has been very good. The guys used to literally log the ticket on the dashboard, and they answer us. It's normally back within a day or so, so they've been very helpful.

Before Meraki Dashboard, we didn't previously use a different solution. From my side, I haven't used anything else. But the technical teams have used the traditional Cisco RSR's, and their Aironet Wi-Fi solution, and it's significantly more difficult to deploy those solutions.

The initial setup was very, very intuitive and easy to use, in terms of installation. We've mainly worked on the wireless access point, but there's education that's starting to happen within the NSP environment. You need to get the guys up to speed. And this is a very different way of configuring and doing things, that's the learning journey, but once we actually are up to speed on how to use it, it's much quicker than the traditional use cases. They defined all the test cases and use cases that they'd want to test after deploying. It was pretty successful from the Meraki side, but internally, it was the education side that was lacking because the guys didn't fully understand how to use it, at that stage. And that's why it took so long to deploy.

For the implementation, we ourselves did the POC, but we did have a representative from Meraki here that was guiding us for about a week.

From a pricing perspective, they are still expensive. 

Before choosing we didn't really evaluate other options. The guys are used to using it, but in terms of troubleshooting, they have to access many different systems. The reason why we did a POC with Meraki is because the sales representative came down to visit MTN. There's a Cisco partnership that's in place. They gave us the solution of Meraki and the objective. There was a rationale behind why we should do this POC, and that's why they moved. It was more of a selling initiative. They sold the solution to MTN, so we didn't choose it because the other solutions were not working, it was a sale.

Regarding this solution, there are a few additional comments: from my side, because I'm a managed service provider, and we sell and manage services to our customer, I feel what's lacking right now is the technical training to up skill and manage the service provider. In South Africa, a lot of training is not available. In terms of technical training, there's none of that, apart from the CMNO training.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is to provide a wireless and networking solution for the office or home. I use it at home and at work. 

It has improved my organization in the way that we've got a much better wireless coverage than we had before, and secondly, we have the visibility of all the users.

The most valuable features would be its ease of use and the easy integration.

You can't really clone or replicate a device, that sort of feature would be useful. You can clone the site but you cannot clone the device.

As far as I know, it is very stable. 

The scalability is unlimited. You can scale as much as you want, at least for the environment that I'm in. We don't have thousands, we've only got under ten. It's right for our organization. I think scalability-wise it's capable of scaling up to around 200, maybe a couple thousand. It's all cloud based so we don't control anything.

We have around 45 users using this solution. Their roles are primarily developers. We only require one staff member for the deployment and maintenance which is me. 

It is used in the office environment and if we get more people joining us, we might need more Meraki access points and maybe more filters. 

Technical support is pretty good. They come back to me with the answers or at least help me with how to get answers.

We switched to Meraki from Fortinet. We switched because it was not easy to manage. 

The initial setup was straightforward. The guys from the Meraki website were quite good.

The deployment took a few minutes but the congregation took a couple of days. 

I did the deployment myself.

Licensing is around under 1000 pounds. The licensing is either one year, three years, five years or ten years and during the licensing, we can choose to renew it per year or per every three years. We've got a license for three years. It's about 160 or about 200 pounds each.

I would advise someone considering this solution to go for it. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use most of the features, even the filtering, and layer three level filtering, and we are pulling to the wireless. Our whole network is wireless. The notification feature for detection is very good.

When users are trying to roam from one location to another location, geographical tracking would be helpful. When the administrator can arrange a locking feature it will be handy for others from a security perspective. I would like to see more communication, integration, and visibility.

I have been working with Meraki Dashboard for around five years now.

It is very stable and we have been using it for five years. We are not a twenty-four-seven operation but in that context, we have not had any downtime. 

The scalability is of a high level and is flexible.

The setup is not complex. The Meraki Dashboard has more competitive pricing because almost everybody has a Cisco dealer. They can play around with the margins.

We compared Meraki Dashboard with Aruba and both products are good.

I would rate Meraki Dashboard an eight out of ten.

We use the product to manage the services for our customers. Some of the customers operate the product themselves to monitor installations.

It is a reliable product. It provides a lot of information that is easy to read.

They could offer API functionality for Meraki Dashboard. It will help us develop software immediately using available solutions.

We have been using Meraki Dashboard for five or six years.

Meraki Dashboard is easy to expand. I rate its scalability a nine out of ten.

The initial process is easy.

It is a cloud-based solution, and we can handle the activity remotely. It is very convenient and easy for customers to monitor their business infrastructure. I rate it an eight out of ten.

For some clients, it helps to go over the graph of throughput and utilization with the client looking at a per-machine utilization. They can see, "Are we hitting the cap? Is it time for growth?" Or, "I thought there was no usage, yet now you're showing me there was a high usage, so let's investigate what was using the network." The graphing that was provided on the dashboard was helpful in those ways.

It's a simple, functional solution. 

The solution can scale. 

It is stable and reliable. 

It would go against the philosophy of Meraki since Meraki prides itself on being clean and simple, and functional. However, what we would like from the IT perspective is a lot more granular control, more visibility into the packets, into the routing, and things of that nature. That would be more helpful.

I've been using the solution for more than five years. 

The solution is very stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's scalable, as in you can build upon it and add more locations and things like that. However, in complexity, it is not scalable.

We have witnessed an ROI while using the solution. 

You do pay a premium, and that premium is only worth it if the simplicity of the dashboard brings you an advantage. However, if the simplicity doesn't bring you an advantage, then this product might not be for you.

We use different versions of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. We enjoy its capabilities for the most part. 

We have implemented Cisco Meraki in thirty-two branch offices and our HQ.

This solution provides great Wi-Fi velocity, great security options, and awesome VPN velocity.

Meraki dashboard deserves an Oscar.

We would like to be able to test the health of WAN connections.

Cisco Meraki offers unified management of devices on a network from a centralized dashboard.

The feature that seems most valuable in Meraki is that it covers SD-WAN and also the SD-LAN. In the dashboard, it has an integrated firewall and an integrated wireless LAN controller. Those are the features that are generally most useful for the customer. But, to be honest this is a solution for only small and medium-sized business customers.

I don't think that Cisco needs or wants to improve Meraki. Meraki was acquired by Cisco, and Cisco knows exactly what they wanted from the product. This product is only fitting for small to medium business. In order to work with large corporate enterprises, they have acquired another company that will help them provide an enterprise solution. That's why they are not going to improve Meraki. If they were going to try to scale the application of Meraki to enterprise solutions it would not be a good fit.

Both of the Cisco products don't yet support layer 2 MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching). The only vendor I know of today that is supporting MPLS is Nokia. None of Cisco products supporting that protocol, so I think this is a gap in Cisco products.

As far as scalability, the product is not very scalable. The product will only be fit to cover small to medium businesses and Cisco is not likely to improve on that scalability as they have other products in line for the larger market. If a customer has other hardware that they use which supports a large enterprise, I don't think that Meraki fits as a solution.

To be honest about the technical support, in Kuwait we deal with a Cisco distributor and not Cisco directly. If we have any issues, we contact the Cisco distributor and not Cisco directly. So the technical support is not genuine Cisco support, which has an excellent reputation. 

We made the purchase through a vendor named Nordicom, and they would be the company that provides technical support. At this point, we have not had any problems that required contacting the vendor to get a solution. While I am sure that they will be competent as a Cisco vendor because it requires certification, I do not know for a fact about how good their technical support actually is.

I have worked with other products like Nuage from Nokia and I think the Meraki dashboard has a more beautiful and useful dashboard compared to other vendors. The other dashboards are more difficult than Meraki, which makes them harder to use. The Meraki dashboard is really very good. It has built-in security which is a feature that not all of the other vendors have. Because of this, other vendors have to integrate with other security vendors or products to provide a security option. Because Meraki is part of Cisco, it is integrated with some Cisco security solutions already. I feel Meraki is one of the best at what it does even if it is not fitting to large enterprises.

The setup for the product is not complex. I think it's very good.

I was working for an ISP and the ISP mentality is to manage the dashboard and installations. We don't let the customer manage the dashboard unless they have requested to do that specifically, and we do the installations.

I don't have much experience with the pricing because the financial team is responsible for that. So in terms of comparing the prices between Meraki and other solutions, I do not have direct experience and the information to do that. But I heard that Meraki is not cheap. To be fair this is only what I heard from a good source. It's not the cheapest solution, but it is a good one. I just don't know where it falls exactly in the range of competitors.

Before this, we did not evaluate other solutions because it's a new feature and functionality. Maybe we will test other products now because there are many other players in the market. Each vendor is focused on a specific category of clientele, so not all of the solutions will be appropriate for our needs. We are actually evaluating more than one vendors right now, including Meraki and Datadog.

If a customer who is considering the use of this product is not a very large business and only has few branches, Meraki is a very good solution. For large businesses, it is not a fitting product.

Overall, I rate the product as an eight out of ten. It's a very good solution. The rating is not higher than that because I think eight is the best it can attain at this point. If they make enhancements to make it work more smoothly and add additional useful features, I would rate it higher. I'm leaving the other two points for any future improvements.

The price should be improved — lowered — as well. If it is very expensive compared to other solutions, this will be a challenge for the adoption of the product. Meraki is making a very good solution, but when comparing products, the price will matter to many potential clients. The dashboard is good, but the competing products can improve their own dashboards or make a better, more simple dashboard than the one Meraki has. It's not that big a deal to improve that feature. So if the competition has better prices, a nice dashboard, or better technologies, they will compete and maybe take market share.

As an aside, I had an interesting discussion last week with Cisco while we were evaluating their product. I told them about something that I thought should be improved about the product. They told me: "We are Cisco," meaning that they did not have to worry about improving that aspect of their product because of their popularity and brand name. They have the right to claim they are the best and they have worked to gain that reputation. Most customers know this, and they know Cisco's reputation and their name.

In the end, not all of the customers will go by the name only. Some customers will go with Cisco directly, regardless of how the product develops. But there are other products that compete and customers will discover those when doing comparisons and possibly switch if Cisco does not pay attention to the needs of the clients. For example, Fortinet has its own SD-WAN solution now. Many other players like VMware and Nokia also have their own new or emerging solutions — and they are big, well-known names, like Cisco. If, in the end, they have better solutions, the customer will use their solution instead. It is not enough just to have the name Cisco. 

I am one of the people who is an advocate for Cisco solutions, but the mentality of the company being superior just because they have a name needs to change or the product development will fall behind. Because of this attitude, there is really more reason to consider other products and people will.

Our use case for this solution is primarily monitoring and configuration of the Meraki database.

Meraki Dashboard is the feature I find most valuable because it gives you remote feasibility of managing all the devices worldwide. You don't need to be in the local location already.

I think this product could be improved with a CLI for more directives.

In the next release, I would like to see a little more user intervention or more control given to the engineer.

I have been working with Meraki Dashboard for around five years.

I would rate the stability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

My impression is that this solution is quite scalable. We have some 10 users currently in our organization.

The initial setup process is quite simple. I would rate it a 10, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. This solution is deployed on the cloud.

We compared Meraki Dashboard with Fortinet. FortiManager gives you options, but Meraki Dashboard has more feasibility and more control over all of the Meraki products.

I would recommend this solution to other users.

Overall, I would rate this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst, and 10 being the best.