Meraki Dashboard Reviews

We primarily use the solution for the dashboard functionalities.

Meraki is basically a product we sell as a dashboard. It's the best part of the solution and its greatest selling feature.

Meraki gives a very comprehensive dashboard which gives the customer a lot of flexibility in terms of understanding the exact situational position of their infrastructure and what is happening in terms of the infrastructure, or how their access points are behaving. They can also gain visibility into access points of zones. 

The dashboard itself is very simplified and easy to navigate.

There is good documentation in the form of manuals.

The management is very good.It typically covers all of our client's requirements. Most of the clients are very into CSG and they are very willing to take the kind of dashboard offering Meraki has.

India is generally pro-Cisco, as far as networking is concerned, which makes the solution an easy sell. Now that the internet bandwidth has become stabilized in India, we get a lot out of the solution. That makes the cloud capabilities very attractive. With the cloud, clients can cancel at any time, and there aren't controllers on-site to worry about.

Overall, the dashboard is already quite good.

However, a few popular improvements that could be suggested include user-based tracking and user-based location tracking. If a client could add those things on, on top of whatever they're using, that would be ideal.

For example, within a building, if I am a user and I have a seat on the fourth floor, if I move across the building, the system should be able to track me and should be able to figure out my whereabouts or my position within the building if I'm connected to the wireless. That would make the administrator's life easier in terms of reachability.

There should be a certain amount of visibility in terms of security validation, or vulnerability assessment. If that can be incorporated, that would be great.

For example, in a single dashboard, you could be getting security incidents, so you could better be able to understand your readiness from the security perspective.

I've been dealing with the solution for two to two and a half years at this point.

The solution is extremely stable. I haven't found it to be non-operational on any of my customers. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs.

As far as scalability is concerned it's simply all about putting additional licenses and adding more number of access points. It's quite scalable, and it's very easy to expand the offering.

The dashboard won't change. The look and feel will remain the same. It's only the number of users and the number of access points that will be added under the same dashboard.

From a scalability perspective or from a manageability perspective, Meraki has a great amount of potential. 

In terms of technical support feedback, I won't be able to comment on anything as I am not from an implementation team. This work is being handled by my implementation team, and, since I don't assist in that respect, I've never dealt with technical support directly.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not very complex.

In terms of the length of time it takes, I won't be able to comment on the deployment part, as it's not something I handle personally. What I've heard from my implementation team is that the time compared to any other on-prem solution is pretty fast. It's really about the access points and having them share a little bit of the cloud. You can simply have a plugin-based kind of deployment scenario as well. It's not hard.

Of course, there are obviously security policies that come into play as well. That has to be done regardless of if it is on-premises or not. Security items can be complicated. That said, our team considers the setup to be easy. It's simple and fast to deploy overall.

We handle the implementation for our clients.

We are Cisco partners. We deal with a variety of Cisco products in their rather large portfolio.

We tend to observe whatever is required for the client's environment and we do ensure we take care of all those requirements. Our approach is all client-driven. Based on that, we tend to work with different versions. Most of the customers want to go with the latest version.

I would definitely recommend the solution. 

From what I have seen in the last couple of years there's a trend towards the cloud market in India (apart from a few governments). In India, we have a government regulation that if you want to have your data on the cloud, then you have to meet certain compliances and you have to have data held centrally in India only. There are lots of challenges in government cloud operations.

Apart from the government, whether it's a large, small or medium-sized enterprise, this solution would work well. They will find a lot of value in having a Meraki solution in their company. I have noticed that most of the customers moving to a cloud-based situation generally prefer Meraki over any other brands.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We are using Meraki Dashboard to log in to the firewall and to set up the VPN, etc. Our firewall is deployed on-premises.

It is very easy to manage. It has good security, and it is working well with our firewall.

There is a bit of a problem when you try to log in and you don't have a fixed IP address. 

If you're granting access, you need to log in by using the IP address. If your administrator's IP address is not a fixed IP address and it has changed, you might need to update the changed IP address in the interface. For this, you need to log in to the interface to update the IP address. This issue might not have so much to do with Meraki interface. 

I have not seen any issues with its stability and scalability.

We contacted their technical support once during the initial setup. We had a couple of questions, and it was a quick call. Their technical support was fine. 

We are a volunteer organization. Being a not-for-profit charity, we have a couple of companies that provide charity support to us. We also have one person who remotely provides in-house support.

I would recommend this product. I would rate Meraki Dashboard a nine out of ten.

The most valuable feature is its simplicity in navigating through the dashboard. It's well set out, and the layout is nice and user friendly.

A lot of clients enjoy seeing layer 7 visibility. They get a good indication and insight into what is happening in their network and what applications are being used the most. They can then customize and give preference to business-critical applications.

They can improve the landing page in Meraki Dashboard. When I go into an organization, they can include a lot more infographics. They can also simplify it a bit and consolidate it. For example, if I've got five branches and I go into customer A's profile or organization, I'd like to see an infographic on the landing page providing a snippet of the entire network layout, that is, all branches in one snapshot. From there, I would like to go into the network that I want to work on or view.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for two years. 

It is 100% stable. Once we deploy it, we very rarely have any comebacks. 

I'm happy with its scalability. 

I only have experience of dialing into Meraki technical support. They were very good.

I don't typically work with this solution. Just from my previous experience, it is fairly simple to set up. I don't think there are any issues.

Deployment duration depends on the complexity. It can take two to three days for complex deployments. It can take a couple of hours for simple deployments.

Typically, the license model is for one, three, and five years. They can just be a bit more flexible around it and look into providing an option for 24 months.

If you are looking for a secure and simple solution, I would highly recommend it.

I would rate Meraki Dashboard an eight out of ten.

We use this product for managing our Meraki devices.

The most valuable feature is ease of use.

The initial setup is complex and can be made more straightforward.

The scalability can be improved.

I have been using the Meraki Dashboard for between three and five years.

I've found this product to be quite stable.

I was having issues and technical support was able to help solve them, so they have quality support.

The initial setup is somewhat complex.

This is a product that I can recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

I am the Practice Director for Network Infrastructure and I primarily use this solution for edge security and WAN routing.

This solution has improved our organization by significantly reducing the time to deploy devices, and it also made remote troubleshooting a lot easier.

The features I find most valuable are the visibility and the ease of management. I like the visibility into all the traffic, feature parity with Cisco ASA firewalls and things like that.

Something that needs to be improved, is the fact that you if you don't renew the subscription license, it stops working. I would also like to see SSL BPM support for anything else.

The solution has been very stable. We've run into very few bugs, less than on the ASA platform.

We haven't had any issues with scalability and we have multi-hundred device sites, so I believe the solution is really scalable. 

The technical support has been great. Whenever you call them, they're responsive and we get an answer.

We used Cisco ASA before this and we realized that we needed better security compliance, more scalability, and some extra features. This solution now saves us time, and I like the added features that the Meraki dashboard offers. It is also consistent and very reliable. 

The initial setup was pretty easy. You simply follow the menu, and it prompts you for the inputs, which is pretty straightforward.

We have seen a return on investment. We've been spending a lot less time on tickets and deployments, so we have more time to do other things.

We have a license for 5 years. I've heard that the advanced security license is a bit on the high end because it's competitive with other solutions. I believe it really depends on the bandwidth, so the bigger your platform, the more you will pay.

We looked at Cisco ASA, Cisco FTD, and Meraki Dashboard. 

My rating for this solution is 9 out of 10 because we've had success with it, very few complaints, and it works great. I think a lot of people think Meraki is more geared towards small businesses, but I would say since Cisco's acquired them, they've come a long way. It is definitely a great solution so I would suggest that others try it out.
In the next version, I would love to see remote access VPN and getting the functionality so that the ASA product line can connect. 

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.

We use this solution to provide Wi-Fi access within the organization.

Using this solution reduces the amount of time that I have to spend managing our network.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the single pane of glass. It has nice features like heat mapping and rogue AP detection. It can analyze the traffic that it is picking up from what may be a rogue access point, and it is able to identify those and send relevant notifications.

Another helpful feature is that it can dynamically change the channel that the AP is using. 

It would be helpful to have the ability to create a floor plan based on an existing PDF or JPEG, which is automatically converted into a usable network map.

The stability is very good. So far it has not gone down, and I haven't experienced any issues with it.

This is a very scalable solution. The APs are relatively lightweight, and we have many of them being managed by one controller. 

I haven't yet needed to use technical support.

We were previously using prox and Wi-Fi APs. We were having all kinds of issues; there was poor visibility, and we had to log in to agents individually. Sometimes the WAN interface would just break, so you would have to reboot it then begin troubleshooting once it came back online. There was a need for a centralized solution.

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward. You have to purchase the license for the Enterprise, and then purchase a license for each AP. Then you create a login with that license and you can build out your networks. It is easy to configure, and this includes defining your access points.

I am the only person who maintains this solution for our organization.

We used CDW to assist with our implementation and deployment, and our experience was very good.

I don't have an accurate measure for ROI, but the time savings suggests that there is something there.

The licensing fees are $180 USD, per AP, for three years. I don't recall the initial startup costs.

I did not shop around very much. I had heard about what this solution could do and choose it based on that.

This product saves me time and I am very happy using it. It is a great product, but nothing is perfect. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.