Meraki Dashboard Reviews

The solution is used to monitor our devices.

The most valuable features are the ease of use and a single-pane-of-glass that allows us to identify issues across the entire network from one dashboard. We can access the dashboard from any network.

The solution has a limited routing table and needs improvement by increasing the numbers as well as providing a summarization for the table.

I would like to have some features that enable the customer to choose the MTU. This is extremely helpful as it is not currently possible to do this from the customer side. We can see that this will be useful for setting up the MTU for various conditions, particularly for voice and any traffic manager that can alter our routing table.

The routing for calls was limited due to certain protocols, so a big review was conducted. Especially for advertising, the routing table and receiving routing tables from internal BGP or external BGP, enhancing this would be helpful. We also collect everything. We only have the option for BGP and BGP is not available in the routing mode, it is a routed model. All features such as a concentrator mode are included, however concentrator mode only has one cable, so we cannot control it. For example, if we want to connect one connection to concentrator mode, we have to do it manually from the firewall side, not from the concentrator mode or Meraki side. It would be helpful if we could add one connection for the concentrator mode to be managed from the Meraki Dashboard, not from the firewall such as Fortinet or Palo Alto.

I have been using the solution for one year.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

I give the scalability a seven out of ten.

The solution is designed for a midsize organization.

The technical support is good.

Positive

I give the initial setup a seven out of ten. 

We sometimes encounter some unexpected problems during the initial setup, particularly with some devices. We should create a reset button to connect them to the dashboard. This is definitely an issue for us, as sometimes the device is not directly connected to the dashboard. We have to restart the device. Additionally, if we change one connection, it may become static, and we need to reset the device. Therefore, we need someone to do this on-site.

Deployment takes around 30 minutes per switch and requires one person per site.

I give the solution a one out of ten for pricing. The solution is currently the most expensive on the market.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

Two people are required for maintenance.

The solution is useful for medium size organizations, is user-friendly, easy to monitor, and doesn't require any configuration. I recommend the solution to others.

I would say the ease of use is the most valuable feature. It's very easy to set up and get up and running. 

The downside to the simplicity is that you can't get as granular as you could with the Cisco APs. They don't have a command line interface, or CLI, so you can't just go into the CLI and copy and paste a bunch of commands. You have to do it through the dashboard. That would be the biggest downside.

Their biggest improvement needs to be their documentation. With Cisco, for example, you can just Google whatever image your controller is on. You can say, "I want an 8.5 config guide," and they will give you a PDF that goes from A to Z, with everything you need to know in one place for that software image. You can just open up the guide, do a search for whatever you're looking for, and boom, it'll take you to it. Meraki, on the other hand, does not do that, so if you want to learn anything, you kind of have to know what it is you're looking for to begin with. It's just a webpage database of articles and you've got to basically find what you're looking for. I would love to just have a guide for each software release as opposed to me having to hunt it out.

I've been using this solution for about a year and a half now. 

The stability has been amazing. I don't have to manage it a 10th as much as I have to manage my Cisco stuff.

It's very scalable. We have dozens of employees using the dashboard because each location has its own technician and they have access to their location.

I did 99% of the setup. The only thing I had to get help with was for some of the security guys to do their stuff, but it's really easy to set up. That's the great thing about Meraki et al. It is super easy, almost just straight out of the box. You can watch an eight minute video and have an access point up and running. Getting into the nitty gritty is a little harder. When you want to start doing radio profiles and power control, that gets a little more convoluted. It's easy once you know where to look in the dashboard, though. The hard part is knowing where to find the granular stuff, but the initial setup is super easy.

I would say that once you get it really scaled out, one person can maintain it, but that's not how we do it. The security guy handles the firewall part, the voice guy handles the voice part, and I handle the wireless part.

You don't have to pay for the dashboard. You pay for a license, and an access point comes with it. You use the free dashboard to manage those access points.

My advice to those considering this solution is that if you want a set it and forget it solution, this is great. If you want a solution that you can get into the minutia and adjust at a really super granular level, this is not the solution for you.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten. 

You can control your access points through the current Meraki dashboard. You can also run Cisco switches through the solution if you design your network that way. I've used them in a school environment before with Meraki Access Points. We were handling several students accessing Chromebooks to get to their assignments. An MX400 was being utilized, and it worked really well.

You can help shape the traffic if you have a single point location where you can go and get information on the equipment, including how it's doing and what its bandwidth utilization is. There are some whitelist blacklist capabilities in the MX dashboard, which is very helpful.

Meraki Dashboard's pricing could be improved. Price has become a very real issue in our economy right now. Any product is worth considering if it can help you save some money and still get quality equipment.

Meraki Dashboard could do a little better in the planning stage regarding heat map creation. Once the solution is deployed, you can utilize a heat map capability within Meraki, which is pretty good. However, the pre planning stage is very difficult because you'd have to get a third-party vendor and get their software.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for about ten years.

I rate Meraki Dashboard a seven out of ten for stability.

Meraki Dashboard is a very scalable solution.

I rate Meraki Dashboard an eight out of ten for scalability.

I rate Meraki Dashboard a six out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

Meraki Dashboard's deployment does not take that long. The solution is deployed on a hybrid cloud in our organization. We have an MX400 control head, which acts as a traffic-shaping firewall-type device control unit. However, the dashboard itself is in the cloud.

Like UniFi or Aruba, you can cloud anywhere as long as you've got that address. You could be 1,000 miles away and still check in and see how your network is doing. You can also do some troubleshooting through the network configuration. The solution is deployed on whatever cloud provider Cisco has.

It took only one person to maintain the solution in a school environment with 18 access points.

I use the most up-to-date version of Meraki Dashboard.

Meraki Dashboard was the monitoring product that came with the access points from Meraki. So I haven't used a different product for a different device.

If Cisco could come down on their pricing and UniFi could come up a bit on their support, these two products would be neck and neck all the way.

Overall, I rate Meraki Dashboard an eight out of ten.

We use Meraki Dashboard for office network management. The solution is full SaaS services deployed on the Cisco Meraki cloud.

The dashboard is a valuable feature because it is fully SaaS. This means we can access it from anywhere and we don't have to worry about the infrastructure. This is something that is already available in Cisco regularly, in the old version of Cisco, and something that Meraki sold. The hardware of Meraki is very good quality. Cisco is implementing new features into the dashboard from time to time. The best quality of the Meraki Dashboard is its high level of service. 

The cost of the solution is high and can be improved.

I have been using the solution for five years.

I give the stability of the solution a nine out of ten.

The support is quick, responsive, and user-friendly. It's been a pleasure working with Cisco Meraki Support. They always provide a response and answers. Even when we need to replace devices, they do it quickly.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward for someone with experience.

Depending on the architecture of the network the deployment can take from one hour to one working day.

Meraki Dashboard isn't a cheap product, but the quality is worth the price. I can't say if it's expensive or not, because everyone understands that quality costs.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We currently have two people using the solution.

Just as Mercedes is known for its high-quality cars, Cisco is known for its high-quality networking hardware. If we're looking for a reliable network, we can't go wrong with Cisco equipment. Hardware and software come from different sources, but together they create a winning solution. Cisco provides the hardware and Meraki provides the software. I believe that there are cheaper products available, but the quality is not the same. In the five years I have been using Meraki I have not checked the competitors. I am not familiar with the pricing for alternative solutions, so I can't compare where Meraki Dashboard fits in terms of cost.

I recommend the solution to others. Meraki Dashboard is a quality solution, intuitive, easy to implement, and has great support.

We're using Meraki Dashboard for the overall insight and management of the products and services that we have with Meraki, whether switches, SD-WAN, access points, MDM, or the system manager. Meraki Dashboard is our overall portal for service management for all Meraki products.

Meraki Dashboard helped my company because it allows the oversight and management of Meraki products and services from an operational and maintenance perspective, including software updates and overall utility. The solution also allows the segregation of rights so that multiple people can quickly manage different aspects of the services.

What I found most valuable in Meraki Dashboard is that it's well-organized, easy to use, and practical.

An area for improvement in Meraki Dashboard is licensing management because it's a little complex. Product licensing can be made a little bit easier through license concurrency and a more straightforward approach to applying the license to products and services.

I've been using Meraki Dashboard for five or six years now. I'm still using the solution but in a different capacity.

Meraki Dashboard is a stable solution.

Meraki Dashboard is a scalable solution.

I found the technical support for Meraki Dashboard good, so I'm rating it four out of five.

From a dashboard perspective, my company used Fortinet before  Meraki Dashboard to oversee products and services.

Meraki Dashboard was straightforward to set up.

I've seen ROI from Meraki Dashboard.

Meraki Dashboard is a utility and portal that's part of the Meraki solution.

In my company, ten to twelve people use Meraki Dashboard.

As the Meraki Dashboard deployment was very straightforward, only two to three people deployed it. Ten people handled the maintenance of the solution, but it was based on areas in which people had responsibility.

Currently, there's no plan to increase the usage of the Meraki Dashboard.

I would recommend Meraki Dashboard to others who have Meraki products and services, as the solution can provide oversight into what you're doing and what you'll be able to maintain from a Meraki point of view.

My rating for Meraki Dashboard is eight out of ten because it's a strong product for me.

Cisco has a cloud partnership, which you can use to provide use cases for the customer.

All products can be monitored and managed from the same dashboard.

There could be an on-premise server for the dashboard.
Meraki can download the full server from the cloud to on-prem for the client. It will be beneficial to get new insight and new options. It will be an innovation for Meraki. Other cloud providers provide this feature.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for over five years in presales and one year in a technical role.

We didn't face any issues with the solution's stability.

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

The solution is mainly for medium businesses but can work on small and enterprise businesses.

I rate the solution’s scalability a nine out of ten.

Meraki Dashboard has excellent technical support in the UK and a lot of sales support. However, the support for the BOC license was not as good.

We have used Fortinet before. Meraki is a management platform focused only on the dashboard. They give 100% effort to support all things. Fortinet is not as powerful as Meraki.

The product’s pricing is neither high nor low.

I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We are using Meraki in our network environment. It's for monitoring and analysis. 

The solution is easy to use. 

The initial setup is very easy.

We have found the client dashboard to be very simple to use, especially in our Meraki environment. 

It's mostly stable. 

The solution can scale. 

We've had some issues with the product and are looking to replace it. 

The coverage has been an issue for us. 

In the traffic analysis, there are too many categories.

I do not have any notes for new future features. 

I've used the solution for about three years. 

The stability is okay. However, with the cloud, it depends on the internet traffic. Sometimes the connectivity is not good, and that can affect the product. I'd rate the stability seven out of ten. 

The solution has been scalable. I'd rate the ability to expand nine out of ten.

We have around 250 users on the solution and 500 devices. 

So far, in terms of technical support, we've had some cases. They are fine.

We are planning to replace Meraki with Fortinet. I've used Fortinet in the past. There are some extra features, such as the firewall from Fortinet, that are a bit better. 

The setup process is very simple. It's not overly complex. 

The licensing is okay. I'd rate it five out of ten. It could be less expensive. 

We did evaluate other vendors as well and compared them to Meraki. 

I'm an end-user. 

I wouldn't recommend the solution to others right now. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall. 

I am using Meraki Dashboard for Meraki equipment for all of our corporate offices worldwide.

The most valuable feature of Meraki Dashboard is we can manage our switches and access point in one place.

The tool is useful for managing devices and monitoring their current state, but it falls short in troubleshooting network issues, particularly with access points. It does not provide a complete understanding of the root causes of the issues. As a result, network engineers have had to use additional tools to complement it and conduct assessments. The only way to improve the tool would be to enhance its capability to identify and resolve network issues effectively.

A feature that can conduct band analysis and provide information about deadlines and related details would be beneficial.

Repeatedly rebooting devices due to errors can disrupt operations, so it's not recommended. However, there are times when it's necessary to reboot access points or switches. The process of scheduling a reboot can be cumbersome, as it involves using the API and building a pipeline script through the console. This adds another layer of complexity to managing and supporting the system.

I have used Meraki Dashboard within the past 12 months.

The support from Meraki Dashboard is highly responsive.

I rate the support from Meraki Dashboard a nine out of ten.

Positive

The pricing of the tool is relatively high compared to other solutions. It comes with a premium that exceeds that of its competitors by approximately 25 percent.

By cross-training our systems administration team to support both, we have been able to reduce our overall organizational footprint and rely on network engineers only when needed. This flexibility has some advantages that can be scaled up across the organization, but it's worth noting that the cost of the tool is higher than other solutions, particularly when only a simple access point or switch is needed.

I rate Meraki Dashboard an eight out of ten.