Meraki Dashboard Reviews

My organization runs a global business across retail and mining/manufacturing, with around two and a half thousand sites in Meraki Dashboard.

My teams structure and govern configuration templates across our distributed branch locations within Meraki Dashboard by utilizing templates across almost all of our branches. We have some sites which deviate substantially from what the templates dictate, so we have broken those out, but for the most part, most of our sites are on templates. We are planning to exit templates in the next 12 months, as I believe that functionality is going away and is inhibiting our ability to use some of the newer features in Meraki Dashboard.

My organization has seen significant benefits from having Meraki Dashboard, with time savings, configuration consistency, and the ability to troubleshoot issues from a single pane of glass. It is a fantastic product for our retail use case in particular.

I have observed differences when diagnosing remote client connectivity issues using Meraki Dashboard's remote tools compared to dispatching on-site technicians. The visibility that we get in Meraki Dashboard compared to historical tooling with either unmanaged switches or manually managed switches allows us to get everything in one place. We can often identify the root cause of an issue or talk a branch non-technical user through a resolution quite quickly, which saves a lot of frustration for our users and for us.

What I appreciate most about Meraki Dashboard is that we can manage multiple aspects of our network from a single pane of glass. It has come a long way even in the seven years I have been using it. There are all sorts of new features and functionality that we get access to, including new products. I am particularly disappointed that Meraki Sensors are leaving the product, but having all of our routing, switching, and wireless for our retail branches in one dashboard is fantastic.

Meraki Dashboard's automated alerts and event logs have altered how my team handles configuration drift across multiple site deployments. Configuration drift is a big challenge for us at the moment, particularly with people making individual network-level changes. We are looking to utilize other automation technologies to help with that, such as NetBox and Terraform to detect and enforce configuration drift. The alerting that has been developed over the last year or so is proving extremely valuable and beneficial.

My teams incorporate AI assistant insights and root cause recommendations within Meraki Dashboard into our day-to-day triage workflows, making the AI assistant functionality in Meraki Dashboard one of our first go-to troubleshooting tools.

Particularly with more complex issues, the deep reasoning functionality that is available in it has saved a huge amount of time and provides considerable value.

I am disappointed that Meraki Sensors feature is leaving Meraki Dashboard because we use Meraki Sensors heavily across our Australian retail branches for a number of different use cases, and Meraki has discontinued the MT sensor product range, which will be getting sunset at some point. We are disappointed about that.

I do not know yet if they are replacing it with something else, but I believe it may be going out to third-party manufacturers to offer that as a service that integrates.

If I could improve the product in any way, I want to add that there are a number of functions in Meraki Dashboard that you can only do from the dashboard that are not available to us in the API. My role focuses heavily on automation, and that is a real pain point for us as new features come out. We really want to push Meraki to have API parity with every aspect of Meraki Dashboard.

Configuration templates influence policy consistency across my distributed branches and are a big pain point for us with local site exceptions. If something needs to change for a local site requirement, then we end up having to break that site out of the template and manage it separately.

The number of sites that we have had to do that for in the last couple of years has increased, which dramatically increases the management overhead for those broken-out networks, and it is slowly eroding the value that we get from templates. That is why we are looking to transition to more Terraform automation-driven configuration management and get rid of templates.

I rate Meraki Dashboard a seven and not higher because templates cause us a lot of grief, and the lack of API parity is a real challenge for us. We would really appreciate seeing the API rate limit increased as well.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for about seven years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Meraki Dashboard overall as generally pretty good, considering we run a considerable amount of Meraki networks in our dashboard across the globe. Occasionally, we have had performance problems when new features get added or turned on that can grind things to a halt. I can see the team has done an extensive amount of work over the last year or so improving that performance, and generally, it is not an issue for us.

Meraki Dashboard does grow with the needs of my organization.

I have worked with customer support on and off for various issues.

I would evaluate customer support as generally pretty good, but some of the more painful experiences I have had have been around bugs in Meraki Dashboard that I have had to fight to prove were actually bugs in the dashboard. I was frustrated by the time it took both to have the bug accepted as an issue and then have it resolved. It took approximately six months to get something I consider fairly simple fixed.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I rate customer support overall as a seven.

I previously used VeloCloud in my previous organization before a merger. That was only for the SD-WAN side of things, not on routing or switching.

I do not have any metrics from before I joined this organization via a merger. However, we used VeloCloud, which is a competing SD-WAN product in the previous organization, and there were elements of VeloCloud that I really missed coming across. The benefits we got from having switching and routing and wireless all together far outweigh the things that I have missed.

Regarding pricing and licensing, we are covered under a Meraki EA from a licensing perspective, which covers all the licensing. The pricing of the hardware is not terrible, but some of the switching and wireless components can be quite expensive without pushing our accounts team for steeper discounts.

I have looked into other solutions, and that seems to be the way that Meraki is going via Network as Code, Net to Code, and the Cisco DevNet pathways. That seems to be what they are recommending.

I have not looked at other solutions outside of Cisco because we are very heavily invested in Meraki and would not, short of a major issue, consider transitioning away from that.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I rate Meraki Dashboard overall as a seven.

My main use case for Meraki Dashboard is troubleshooting and assisting users. When someone complains about network latency or intermittent issues, I can access the dashboard and identify what could be down or what errors are occurring.

I also use Meraki Dashboard to set up VPN for users.

Meraki Dashboard has positively impacted my organization because I can train someone using the same model. The setups for all of our customers are identical, so I can train a new hire or an existing person transitioning into the role, and the way I approach it can be easily relayed to the person learning how to do it.

This approach has reduced training time for new people, especially for new hires within the IT team, since the procedure is consistent with how I approach it. They don't get access instantaneously, but once they start to get access, it is easier to show them since it's the same for everyone.

The best features Meraki Dashboard offers are its simplicity and the ease with which I can switch between different domains because I manage dealers across the country, making it straightforward to switch between different hubs and set up VPNs.

That feature saves me time because if I have a user from Queensland and a user from New South Wales, it's straightforward to switch and set up the same configuration if they need the same kind of setup, which makes my day easier. The fact that it's the same layout everywhere means I'm never going to get lost.

Adding new equipment, such as access points, is straightforward. It's easy to claim them, and once I know how to do it once, it's something I can retain and move forward from there.

I would probably have different layers for different people in different fields regarding how Meraki Dashboard can be improved. For example, someone who is a systems administrator versus someone who is level one or a field engineer would benefit from restricted access. They could still assist with seeing errors that come up, but because they don't have the knowledge, they wouldn't get confused between adding access points and adding VPNs, allowing them to see if there's a latency problem or a connectivity problem.

Having something for our higher-level manager people within the business would be beneficial regarding analytics and high-level information because they don't need to know the technical aspects, but knowing what access points are having problems and other relevant information would be very helpful. For example, their user count, how many people connect to the guest network, and how many people are within the vicinity of the network would help them and their marketing team.

Meraki Dashboard analytics could provide level one triage functionality by sending a ticket to the IT help desk for a possible outage or downtime, specifying whether it's a Meraki-specific issue or a network provider issue.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for about four years.

Meraki Dashboard is stable. I have never had an issue connecting to the dashboard and using it in four and a half years, and I've never had Meraki Dashboard be offline or down.

Meraki Dashboard is scalable because we have a lot of remote dealers, allowing us to have zero-touch devices that we can send pre-provisioned. Once they're plugged in, they pick up all the configuration they need, which is probably one of the biggest advantages.

I would say customer support is good when needed, but honestly, I don't need to seek external support from my position.

I have only previously used Ubiquity before, and it was on a much smaller scale, so I don't have much else to contribute regarding that question.

Since having the user account, we've probably reduced the need for two or three network engineers. However, having Meraki Dashboard has allowed us to get away with just one engineer and spread the knowledge among the entire IT team, whether it pertains to development or system administration, to help manage the workload. Being able to reduce the headcount to one user who is comfortable with the workload has probably been the biggest benefit and return on investment.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I rate Meraki Dashboard a seven.

I chose 7 out of 10 because I think some of the reporting and initial triage perspectives could be improved, but overall, it's a really good platform and pretty easy for most people to pick up.

That's probably something we're wanting to move towards in the not-too-distant future, especially concerning some of the analytics side, though I may not be ready from an infrastructure point of view to have it actually make or maintain changes.

I haven't used the AI dashboard extensively, but it has been helpful for some troubleshooting when I can't quite remember where to go within Meraki Dashboard. It's very helpful in that sense for documentation, but beyond that, I haven't explored it yet.

My advice to others looking into using Meraki Dashboard is to go in with open eyes. Ensure you get a good price depending on the size of what you're trying to implement, and make sure that you're getting what is necessary so you don't get undersold or oversold on anything.

I use Meraki Dashboard for configuration, troubleshooting, and monitoring as the primary use cases.

The features I have found most valuable are that Meraki Dashboard itself is fairly easy to navigate. There is a health or insurance tool that allows me to check quickly if there is any misconfiguration or anything unusual in the system, which is quite convenient for quick troubleshooting.

My impression of the end-to-end visibility offered by Cisco is that they are improving this, but it is quite interesting if I have the same brand like Meraki switches, firewalls, and so on, because everything is on the same console. However, if I use heterogeneous devices like Catalyst plus Meraki plus other devices, I also have API, Nexus, and so on, so it is a bit harder. I know there are some initiatives for that, but there is no consolidated tool or console that allows me to manage globally all the devices I have. Even if there are some efforts, such as Catalyst Center or Nexus Dashboard, I still have to jump from one console to another if I want to have the global picture.

What I would like to improve in Meraki Dashboard is the template part, which is really helping me to manage at large scale. Integration with AI or native AI functionality would be interesting depending on the price, how far it goes, and how far it shares the information I have. For the rest, it is quite straightforward. The next tool maybe to be integrated, which I do not know if it exists today within Meraki, is IPAM management for IP address management. I do not know if it is part of the roadmap, but it is something I have to use on a dedicated platform, so integrating this would be interesting as well.

Finally, I would rate Meraki Dashboard overall as a 9 out of 10. There are still some missing features, but there are also some considerations. I am familiar with the Chinese situation where there is a dedicated portal for China, so if I need to deploy access points in China, I have to connect to a dedicated portal due to the regulations in that country. However, this is not due to Cisco or company policy.

I have been familiar with Meraki Dashboard for approximately one and a half years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Meraki Dashboard as having no major issues so far, which I would rate as a 9.

I would rate the technical support by Cisco from 1 to 10 as really good, between 8 and 9, so I would put it at 9.

Prior to Meraki Dashboard, I was using, and I am still using, the regular Cisco wireless controller, so I can really see the difference between both. I have offices spread across countries; I am based in Europe with data centers in Europe, but I have some offices in India, China, and other countries. It was quite painful when I had connectivity issues between the data center and the remote side because all the access points lost their connectivity and there was no Wi-Fi anymore. The fact that Meraki Dashboard is cloud-based makes it easier for me. I have less traffic going through the data center, it is more stable, and Adecco has access because the main account or main management is done by Adecco. I am just a user of the solution, and it makes my life easier.

I did not deploy Meraki Dashboard myself; I am just a user, so I just connect to the dashboard and do the configuration there.

Regarding their pricing, the company I work for, Akkodis, was acquired by Adecco in 2022, so I am using the same technologies and I am somehow on the contract regarding Meraki purchase and so on. Prices are good compared to the equivalent from competitors. Features are quite good. The hardware is maybe a bit more expensive than the other ones, but it is reliable, so I pay for the brand more or less. I know that I can use the hardware for years and years without much issues; at least the hardware part is really stable.

I am definitely working with Cisco products, or more accurately, working with Cisco products. I am working not only with Cisco ISE but other products as well, such as wireless, switches, and servers. I am mostly working with Cisco products such as Catalyst, and mostly Catalyst and Meraki. For Meraki switches and firewalls, I mostly work with switches and access points, focusing mostly on access points and some of the switches. Regarding MS switches, I only have a bunch of them, and I am starting to use them, so mostly I use Meraki access points and Cisco Catalyst switches. I am not working with Cisco Meraki MX. I am just starting to work with Meraki MS switches, and I have not installed them yet. I am dealing with Meraki Dashboard. Overall, I rate this product a 9 out of 10.

My use case for Meraki Dashboard is to provide simplicity and manage our networking devices such as wireless access points, switches, and everything through Meraki Dashboard. If we managed devices manually through the legacy, traditional way, we would have to open many things and go to specific devices to check the access points and other equipment. With Meraki Dashboard, we can manage everything from one centralized dashboard.

Using Meraki Dashboard saves my company a significant amount of time. Before implementing this solution, if we assigned an IP to an access point and then found that access point in the Cisco wireless controller, we had to manage it through a time-consuming mechanism using the traditional method. With Meraki Dashboard, the process is very simple. I just turn on the access point and scan the QR code, and it appears in Meraki Dashboard.

The configuration templates I use influence our policy consistencies across distributed branches. When we have templates, we can push them through the branches wherever we want to implement them. We have seven branches: two in Melbourne, two in Sydney, and two in other cities. Once one template is ready, we can deploy it to other devices without creating the templates again from the beginning. This saves us a lot of time and energy, and the chances of mistakes are very low because we are not doing everything repeatedly. The templates help us tremendously.

What I like most specifically in terms of features is the simplicity. Whatever I want to do, whether I want to see the alerts and logs or configure a wireless access point, I can access that from the dashboard. To set up an access point, I just plug in the cable, and the access point comes into Meraki Dashboard by scanning the QR code. This makes life very easy.

I have used Meraki Dashboard for structuring and governing templates. We have templates for Wi-Fi, SSID, and wireless configurations. We use those templates when we have to provide any specific SSID on the wireless access points. In our environment, we have an IT department and finance department. When we have to broadcast the SSID specifically to our IT department, we use that pre-defined template. We just apply those templates to broadcast the SSIDs into our organization.

Meraki Dashboard has helped with automated alerts and event logs. I can see the logs through the dashboard, so it is all automated. I don't have to specifically open the device and check which access point is connected to which switch. I can check everything through the dashboard as everything is displayed there.

My team has structured alerting thresholds and automated workflows in Meraki Dashboard to handle configuration drifts. We have baseline templates that I created for our configuration. Whenever a new access point or new switch comes into our organization, we use those baseline templates and push them to configure the switches and access points through them.

The simplicity of Meraki Dashboard is already very good. I have been working in the industry for seven years, and I have not encountered any issues with Meraki Dashboard. It is very good and straightforward.

Meraki Dashboard already has SD-WAN capabilities, and it would be beneficial if we could integrate Catalyst switches with Meraki Dashboard. Cisco is already doing this through Cloud D, integrating a lot of separate functionalities together into a unified platform. I think Meraki Dashboard will eventually be consolidated into Cloud D in the future. I like that direction.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for five or more years.

Meraki Dashboard is very stable. I have been working in the industry for seven years, and I have not faced any single issue with Meraki Dashboard. It is very straightforward. When people ask me in interviews whether I have seen any problems or troubleshot any issues with Meraki Dashboard, I respond honestly that I have not encountered any problems. Meraki Dashboard is very simple and straightforward.

I have worked directly with Meraki Dashboard customer support. My experience with them was positive. There was one wireless access point that was not getting scanned into Meraki Dashboard and kept experiencing issues. After getting in touch with the support team, they mentioned that the issue was on our internal side, specifically with the DHCP configuration. It was not related to their wireless access point or equipment. We checked the DHCP side after that and found it was a lease scope and IP address issue. The support team was correct. They guided us to the point where the problem was located. I would rate the support team 10 out of 10.

Before adopting Meraki Dashboard, we were using wireless LAN controllers. Now we avoid wireless LAN controllers, and our access points connect directly to Meraki Dashboard.

The previous solution was costly, and Meraki Dashboard is less costly and easier to manage. We don't have to go through a lot of different devices. I can handle all networking management through Meraki Dashboard.

The prices for Meraki Dashboard are quite high. If our organization were moving and we were prior customers of Cisco, we should receive a discount on our license because the licensing is very costly. I remember that if we even add one or two extra access points, after two or three days we get an alert stating that we have to get a license or pay for that. There should be more leniency regarding the cost associated with Meraki Dashboard.

My main use cases for Meraki Dashboard are wireless, wide visibility, and troubleshooting.

Configuration templates influence policy consistency across my distributed branches in a way that we haven't used a lot of templates, making it probably not relevant to our use case.

Meraki Dashboard's automated alerts and event logs probably do not alter my team's handling of configuration drifts significantly, but they provide information that helps us identify issues, particularly user impact. For example, if the client faces a DHCP issue, we can see that on the dashboard now, whereas before, the client would have to tell us there's an issue. This helps by giving us user impact information that is causing the problem.

My teams incorporate AI-assisted insights and root cause recommendations within Meraki Dashboard into our day-to-day triage workflows in a way that even staff who are not at a higher technical level can use it to resolve issues and get back to users, which helps avoid escalating it to our IT partners and saves costs.

I have not observed differences when diagnosing remote client connectivity issues using the dashboard's remote tools compared to dispatching on-site technicians. It comes down to time and cost to send a technician on-site since a lot of information is now provided in the dashboard. For example, packet captures and similar data are available in the dashboard rather than having an engineer there doing it manually.

Recently, the feature I find most valuable in Meraki Dashboard is the AI Assistant because it makes the time spent on troubleshooting and root cause analysis significantly faster. That's the main benefit, and that's what our customers are looking for: they want to reduce the time people spend on troubleshooting and getting to the bottom of the issues.

I can quantify this improvement: for something like a wireless issue for a client that would take a wireless engineer a couple of hours to troubleshoot using manual means, asking the agent today on Meraki Dashboard gives us a more detailed outcome and the root cause for it in five minutes using deep reasoning.

Meraki Dashboard could improve in areas where there is a bit of a delay when trying to load certain pages. The time it takes for an event to appear in the dashboard, especially for the wired network, is not as prompt as it is for the wireless network. If there is a user connectivity event, it's visible in the dashboard very quickly with the wireless, but the wired network has a delay before it shows up.

One of the reasons that would make it a 10 for me is definitely the tech support.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for six or seven years.

I would assess the reliability of this dashboard as not having experienced any crashes. When it is unavailable, we receive an alert about maintenance, but other than that, it's been fine. One thing we probably didn't comprehend is that the way Meraki is set up requires each site to be upgraded all at once, which differs from Prime Infrastructure, where individual AP and switch upgrades can be done separately. This was a surprise for us, more of a knowledge thing than a limitation.

Meraki Dashboard grows well with the needs of my organization because it's cloud-managed, so we don't have to worry about any on-premises expansion or expanding our virtual environment. New APs just require licensing and hardware.

My experience with Cisco support has been inconsistent and depends on which tech I reach. Sometimes they resolve issues quickly within minutes or hours, but at other times, I end up with techs who drag things on without timely responses.

If I were to rate Meraki Dashboard support on a scale of one to ten, I would say maybe a six or seven.

Before using Meraki Dashboard, I was not using another dashboard to address these needs.

The factors that led me to consider Meraki Dashboard specifically include moving to a cloud-first approach. Before this, everything was managed locally per device. We used a Cisco dashboard for switching and a different vendor product for wireless, so we went to Meraki because our switching and wireless could all be in the same portal.

My experience deploying this dashboard is that it was straightforward and simple. In fact, during a hospital cutover, we did it all in one weekend without any major issues.

For this deployment, we have used Meraki Dashboard for just over six months, and we have seen a significant increase in our operational efficiency, especially with user troubleshooting. I estimate this to be about 50% in terms of the effort or time that people are spending trying to troubleshoot. It's considerably faster.

I have seen a lot of visibility into the network with Meraki Dashboard because we have the wireless and wired all in one. There are issues external to Meraki, but because of the logs and packet captures available on the dashboard, we can sometimes identify that this is outside of the network. We point it out to the business that this is not a network issue, which gets escalated to the right team.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing of this product includes some issues when requesting the trial licenses, which weren't as straightforward as I thought they would be. We had some issues getting the trial APs on-site in time. Once we decided to buy the license, everything was fine. It was only the trial side that had issues.

I considered the Access Manager before selecting Meraki, but it is built into Meraki Dashboard.

I would rate Meraki Dashboard as a solution overall at about an eight or nine on a scale of one to ten, especially in comparison to other vendor cloud solutions.

My main use case for Meraki Dashboard is campus and multi-campus network management, including wireless, switching, routing, VPN, and security.

I use Meraki Dashboard to manage cloud-managed Cisco Catalyst 9300s and 9500s for one of our biggest TAFE education campuses, and I manage my entire wireless network across the whole state of Queensland with 100 campuses and 10,000 students. I use it to manage my Meraki MS fleet of switches and my Meraki MX fleet of security appliances. I use it to monitor, assure, deploy, manage, update, and perform everything under the sun.

My teams rely on APIs, specifically using Meraki Workflows and Meraki APIs very heavily.

My teams incorporate AI-assisted insights and root cause recommendations within Meraki Dashboard into my day-to-day triage workflows by using an AI agent that my company developed. This agent collects data from Meraki Dashboard via the API, alerts, and other external sources, collating that information into ticket management and providing updates. Its biggest current task is managing power outage-related incidents. When a network goes down, it detects the exit of WAPs, switches, and MXs, and checks with the local power company for outages in that area. Once power is restored, it checks again and escalates to a human if systems remain offline.

My network engineering teams do not use templates in Meraki Dashboard. I maintain policy consistency across distributed branches through Meraki Workflows to ensure a consistent network-wide configuration.

Meraki Dashboard positively impacts my organization by having everything in one spot. Having the ability to grab data from Meraki Dashboard using the APIs is fantastic. I can do planning, plan capacity, and scale the network. Assurance features, network stability, and network issues are all managed and reported on from the APIs, which is fantastic.

Previously, I used another vendor before Meraki, and there were constant issues and incidents reported from users that things just did not work very well. Once I switched to Meraki, it really has that just-works feeling.

Meraki Dashboard's automated alerts and event logs have significantly altered how my team handles configuration drift across my multi-site deployments. I have a single glass pane monitoring everything, triggering alerts when someone makes a change, allowing me to follow up to understand the reason and record it for later correction back to the standard if necessary.

Meraki Workflows is the best feature Meraki Dashboard offers.

What makes Meraki Workflows stand out for me is its drag and drop GUI, which has minimal code, allowing anyone who is an administrator on my network to build workflows and automations that can be repeated, saving me and my team a lot of time with rolling out mass changes across the entire network in a programmatic way.

To improve Meraki Dashboard, I would suggest better bulk firewall rule management and organization across Meraki Dashboard along the network-wide layer three firewall rules and the VPN site-to-site VPN firewall rules, which are organization-wide. I would love to see better permanent IDs for each firewall rule so they can be programmatically referred to. Organization-wide and local rule categories with subcategories for collapsing the views in the firewall would help organize the firewall rules by type, such as having an infrastructure category at the top along with subcategories like DNS, Active Directory, syslog, and management, and further categories for SaaS, including Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, all managed visually in groups and categories in the firewall view that I can collapse.

I would like to add that I need more in-depth Meraki security appliance system performance monitoring, enabling Meraki Dashboard to actively monitor and report on MX or security appliance CPU and memory utilization. Currently, that information is not reported in Meraki Dashboard, and I have faced multiple instances of Meraki MXs being overloaded without knowing until users start reporting issues. Being able to see and get alerts from Meraki Dashboard based on metrics from the Meraki MX security appliances would be invaluable. I would love a quick access dropdown in the top corner that is persistent across all Meraki Dashboard pages, allowing easy access to network IDs, device IDs, device names, and network names for quick copying and pasting. Furthermore, the change log should stop truncating large changes to avoid cutting off data because of character limits. Shared organization-wide firewall categories would be beneficial, allowing updates in one spot that reflect everywhere.

The accuracy and reliability of Meraki Dashboard's AI capabilities are not fantastic. The AI repeatedly does not do what I ask it to do; I have to be really specific. It often does not provide the information I am looking for and can stop working, especially if I open a new tab in Meraki Dashboard, which seems to break the AI assistant. I have to wait for it to finish before touching Meraki Dashboard because any changes during that time disrupts the Cisco AI assistant session. My colleague and I often get back different answers when we share prompts with it. Sometimes it gives completely incorrect information that makes no sense.

My network engineering teams do not use templates in Meraki Dashboard because I find them too brittle and limited. They often build me into a corner, breaking everything when customer changes are necessary. I recommend customers avoid templates and instead take advantage of Meraki Workflows to roll out bulk changes and maintain consistent network configurations.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for five years.

Meraki Dashboard tends to be generally stable.

Meraki Dashboard's scalability is fantastic, especially with the power of Meraki Workflows. However, before Workflows and when attempting to use templates, it was terrible.

Customer support tends to be generally pretty good.

I would rate customer support an eight on a scale of one to ten.

I was with Cisco before using Cisco's IOS XE Catalyst switches, and I switched to Meraki due to being a small team facing significant configuration drift across my campuses. With Meraki Dashboard, I was able to standardize the hardware and software on one platform.

I do not have relevant metrics available, but I can confirm that the return on investment is reflected in customer satisfaction, and my customers are very satisfied.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was frustrating. The contact at Cisco I worked with was extremely avoidant, hard to reach, and difficult to get updates from. Questions about the quote took days to weeks for responses, making the process very frustrating.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Meraki Dashboard a six.

I chose a six because as a power user managing a large network, I find Meraki Dashboard designed for small teams or non-network engineers to set up networks quickly and easily, which limits my ability to deliver more services and scale my network faster and better for my customers on the Meraki platform due to design decisions focused on simplicity.

Regarding Meraki Dashboard's AI capabilities, the Cisco AI assistant built into Meraki Dashboard is currently read-only, so it does not make any changes, which is totally fine. I have no issues with that. However, if the Cisco AI assistant in Meraki Dashboard is given the ability to make changes in the future, I would definitely need to have a close look at that, implementing role-based access and controls while ensuring limits are set. For instance, allowing the Cisco AI assistant to turn one port on or off would be acceptable, but it should not allow changes across multiple switches or networks that could cause damage.

Meraki Dashboard is deployed in my organization as the public Cisco, Cisco fully managed cloud in the APJC region.

I have not really structured alerting thresholds or automated workflows in Meraki Dashboard to handle configuration drifts across remote sites, which is something I probably need help with. I have not tuned the thresholds, so I receive all the alerts, making it somewhat noisy. My approach is very human-driven and not automated at this point.

My advice for others looking into using Meraki Dashboard is to take advantage of the APIs to automate and scale their network instead of relying solely on in-built tools. I would strongly recommend using an external tool such as Ansible or Terraform for better network management.

We use Meraki Dashboard, which is a network monitoring software for Cisco Meraki, primarily to monitor Meraki activities, and we also have other monitoring devices across the network. We build a layer interface to extract reporting from Meraki Dashboard, from Datadog for our laptops and other devices, and from Splunk. We have a consolidated dashboard interface where all those reports are being consolidated. My own work is to review performance metrics to ensure that things are happening based on the SLAs that we have with the business. It is the function of my IT group to ensure that these things are working as expected, and we have several dashboards.

We use Datadog, we use ThousandEyes, and we use various other monitoring tools in our system. There are different use cases to monitor Meraki; Meraki Dashboard is specific to Meraki devices. Datadog is specific to all our VMs and other activities within a network, while ThousandEyes is specific to some server services and Cisco devices. We extract all this information into a consolidated interface to have visibility of what is happening across the network without necessarily moving from one dashboard to another. Meraki Dashboard is meant for Meraki devices, including switches, routers, Wi-Fi devices, and any other Meraki-based devices.

I am satisfied with the performance of Meraki Dashboard; it is adequate. We get more than enough information that really helps us to identify issues as they come. If there is any problem, we identify it as fast as possible. We are now building an intelligent, proactive notification system around those incidents. We do not necessarily need to go into the dashboard to be notified; we get the report as and when there is an issue right from our email or from our mobile devices.

There will always be room for improvement. The AI capabilities will surely create a more proactive approach to incident reporting. AI capabilities present a significant opportunity for improvement for Meraki Dashboard as well; anything that has to do with incident and reporting needs a proactive approach, not just a reactive one. Waiting until an incident happens before being notified is not sufficient.

Proactiveness is what I expect. Meraki Dashboard needs to build in proactiveness in incident management reporting. I do not necessarily need to be in front of my dashboard to know what is happening; I should be notified. The functionality is there, but they need to improve on it. Before a problem happens, there should be a diagnostic notification telling me that something is about to fail, and they need to build that into the system. These are things that Meraki is also aware of and will surely happen within the next few months.

I am getting the right technical support from Meraki, so I would give them eight out of ten for all of the Meraki products.

I find the licensing model of Cisco Meraki acceptable; it seems reasonable to me.

There are improvements that I still expect, so I would rate my experience with Meraki Dashboard as seven out of ten. I have mentioned that the AI capabilities regarding incident management will surely reshape the dashboard's functionality in the next few months.

Maraki Dashboard's visibility in Cisco Meraki's marketing strategy is strong, and the competition is very explosive now. Huawei products and HP products are also present in the market. However, because of how easy it is to support Cisco, considering the fact that most of our professional certified people are actually certified on Cisco products, it is the most acceptable infrastructure that any organization would want to deploy for a seamless and easily manageable environment. There are on-ground certified engineers up to the CCIE level for various aspects, whether it is voice, video, base level infrastructure, or ordinary network infrastructure. There are all kinds of professional people that can easily manage the infrastructure. Therefore, Cisco is quite popular and well-accepted across the board, even though price-wise, it is a bit more expensive than competitors.

I manage sites and control wireless by shipping devices to a location and then configuring them. I use Meraki Dashboard to monitor wireless or internet traffic to see clients, find IP addresses, find MAC addresses, understand a vendor or maybe a port that's being used too much or has a third-party device in front of it. There are many uses I have for Meraki Dashboard.

In my opinion, the best features Meraki Dashboard offers include having one place to look and the way it is cloud-managed. We can add old Cisco gear that is compatible to be monitored. I find myself using the cloud management aspect the most, being able to access Meraki Dashboard from any device at any time, not having it dependent on any type of infrastructure at our location, but always being available.

Meraki Dashboard has impacted my organization positively by making management of the large number of networks that we have much easier. We don't have to search extensively or log into each device individually. We can go into the dashboard and use one login and see every device and every network that we've set up, which makes it easier to manage because we also use Meraki products for wireless and switching. It creates a topology for us, and that's beneficial.

Meraki Dashboard helps cut down on time because we're troubleshooting in a single pane of glass. You don't have to look far. You can see traffic and analytics from the dashboard.

I think Meraki Dashboard can be improved by taking into consideration what users are struggling with and trying to implement that into the dashboard in whatever way that is for that individual. For me, it's pretty good as it is right now. I don't have any qualms with it.

I give it a seven because it's not perfect by any means. There are times where I'm not able to get the information I need. It's not a fault of Meraki, it's just the nature of the situation. Sometimes, I have devices that can't find their way back to the dashboard and they get stuck in limbo and you have to do a lot of factory resetting. Making it easier for devices to find their way back to the dashboard would be helpful. I can't give it a ten because sometimes that is a very long process.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for nine years.

Meraki Dashboard is stable.

Meraki Dashboard's scalability is awesome. You can put whatever you need in there, take whatever you need out, and it scales automatically.

Customer support for Meraki Dashboard is awesome and much better than Cisco. I can always reliably get someone to talk to at Meraki. With Cisco, there is a lot of unnecessary complexity and not being very helpful. I would rate the customer support an eight on a scale of one to ten.

Previously, we used Cisco routers and Cisco switches. We had SolarWinds to do the monitoring, but to actually make any changes to the device, you had to log into each one individually. It wasn't a portal that had the collection of all sites. It was going to each one, knowing the IP from SolarWinds, then going to that device, logging into it, and then troubleshooting.

Meraki Dashboard gives my whole team visibility into seeing what a network is doing or what devices they have.

Before choosing Meraki Dashboard, I did not evaluate other options. Meraki was already in place and was just playing a smaller role.

My advice to others looking into using Meraki Dashboard is that if you are looking for a solution that lets you cloud-manage multiple devices in a single environment, this is for you. If you want to get away from having two or three portals to manage your network infrastructure, this is for you. If you have older Cisco gear and want to monitor it, this is for you. I give Meraki Dashboard an overall rating of seven.

My main use case for Meraki Dashboard is network operations across the Meraki suite for mid-market customers.

A quick specific example of how I use Meraki Dashboard in network operations for my mid-market customers is that I manage their network environments using Meraki Dashboard primarily.

A recent scenario where I managed or troubleshot a customer's network using the dashboard illustrates how Meraki Dashboard is getting much better, with AI integration becoming really useful to help customers troubleshoot their own issues without necessarily relying on me and my teams.

When it comes to how I use Meraki Dashboard with my customers, the main thing is probably giving them access to AI, which is really powerful.

My teams manage those templates in a customized way since it is per customer.

While we are not incorporating AI-assisted insights and root cause recommendations into our day-to-day triage workflows, our customers are.

My teams have structured alerting thresholds and automated workflows in the dashboard to handle configuration drifts across remote sites mostly through email alerts.

Meraki Dashboard has positively impacted my organization by improving customer satisfaction and reducing the time to resolution on incidents.

Regarding how much customer satisfaction has improved or how much quicker incidents are resolved, I unfortunately do not have any specific numbers, but I have seen it from an engineering perspective.

The differences I have observed when diagnosing remote client connectivity issues using the dashboard's remote tools compared to dispatching on-site technicians are that it is quicker.

The best features Meraki Dashboard offers are the AI, which is probably the best feature at the moment, along with the ease of configuration, which is the key thing that the dashboard provides.

Day-to-day, AI helps me in that it involves standing up a new site, being able to templatize things, and rolling things out easily. The AI is literally giving a service desk agent access to AI so that they can troubleshoot basic network issues without having to rely on the specialist skillset of the senior engineers.

Regarding Meraki Dashboard's AI capabilities, I think the governance and security are great.

I believe the AI features are secure and well-governed, and I have not spent too much time worried about it.

The accuracy and reliability of output from Meraki Dashboard's AI capabilities have improved a lot over the past year; it was a little uncertain at first, but it has definitely improved.

I believe that Meraki Dashboard can be improved as the menu list is getting quite large and hard to navigate, especially when new features are added, which can lead to losing my way around the menu.

I chose 8 out of 10 because of the menu and when things are added; perhaps there could be a little more guidance as to where to find things.

I have been using Meraki Dashboard for probably about 10 years.

In my experience, Meraki Dashboard is stable.

Meraki Dashboard scales well for my needs.

The customer support experience has been amazing; they are really good.

I would rate the customer support a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that licensing has gotten much easier with the subscription licensing, which has made a massive difference; it is a good move.

I would rate Meraki Dashboard an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Meraki Dashboard is entirely deployed in the cloud in my organization.

I use Cisco as my cloud provider.

My recommendation to others reading reviews on PeerSpot is to try before you buy; the trials are really good.

My main use case for Meraki Dashboard is for business operations, including monitoring the license, inventory, firmware, and network links. I use it for managing Wi-Fi users and SSIDs, enabling DHCP, and managing administrators. I check the client issues as well, focusing on operational tasks.

A recent specific example of using Meraki Dashboard for operational tasks occurred while I was at the Cisco Live event. During one of the sessions, I scheduled a firmware upgrade for the weekend, which included our MX, switches, APs, and video devices.

Aside from that, my main use case for Meraki Dashboard is managing users, applying policies per device, and troubleshooting wireless issues. I manage wireless access points, change the frequencies, and maintain the SSIDs we have in the office.

I use Meraki Dashboard logs more for notification if there are links that are down, but not for changes. I use it as a history tracker, not a notification system.

My teams have not yet incorporated AI-assisted insights and root cause recommendations within Meraki Dashboard into our day-to-day triage workflows, but I am interested in doing this, including the ARR or AMM for the wireless. This is something I am looking forward to checking and playing with to understand and implement.

I have not implemented configuration templates, but I assume it would be easier to manage using templates.

I find that diagnosing remote client connectivity issues using Meraki Dashboard's remote tools will be easier because all the tools are available on the dashboard. However, I still have to work remotely with the user to understand the issue and investigate while using the dashboard in front of the support team.

Meraki Dashboard has positively impacted my organization. Initially, I used it by myself, but I implemented it and have direct reports taking care of troubleshooting or assignments now, which makes it easier for them to use rather than learning CLI to do things. The great aspect of this dashboard is that it is all in one; all the switches, the MX, and the access points are integrated into the devices I have deployed, making it easier for everyone or new hires to get adopted to this interface.

Meraki Dashboard has helped my team onboard new hires and improved efficiency by saving time and simplifying learning the trade, doing BA tasks, and learning the steps to troubleshoot because it is easy. There is also an AI assistant built into Meraki, which I appreciate.

The best features Meraki Dashboard offers are that it is very user-friendly; the interface is easy to manage. I have used command-line interfaces extensively in the past when I was a lead network engineer, and now I am accustomed to this graphical interface, which does not take a lot of time. The metrics and insights are really helpful, especially for reports for our stakeholders.

The metrics and insights help my team by allowing me to normally send a weekly report for bandwidth. I have access to Telstra Connect for the exact view of bandwidth from the service provider's perspective or the circuit side perspective, but in Meraki, I can also have that kind of reporting. The bandwidth for each link is included in the report, along with the top 10 users and top applications used by each user or by each group or group policy that I created.

I just started integrating ThousandEyes and I am looking into how I can monitor traffic to Microsoft, which is something I have not mentioned yet.

Regarding improvements for Meraki Dashboard, I heard about the MCP, which I am interested in as I know it is more about AI. I really want to learn about MCP in Meraki. The tools are great, and I know they have also embedded CLI for the switches, which is good for those of us who prefer the traditional approach and can still go into Meraki CLI and look into it.

I am happy so far with the needed improvements, and I have not noticed any major gaps.

I feel it is almost perfect but not quite a 10 because Cisco also has the new Cisco Call Control Center, which has better feature integration to Cisco switches and Meraki, ThousandEyes, and other tools. I think that adds to Meraki's existing offerings.

The AI tool, the AI agent that is built into it, is somewhat slow; when I ask a question, it takes time to respond or to show the response compared to other normal AI LLMs available in the market. What I realize is that I have to refresh the page for the output to come out, which is frustrating, but if I know the workaround, it will work. That is probably some feedback I could provide.

I first implemented Meraki equipment to say BCP network or backup or ad hoc network in our enterprise network in our office around 2016, and I continue to use Meraki equipment and have expanded it. If I have new sites, I have installed Meraki equipment including MX, switches, MR or access points, sensors, and cameras, so I really appreciate the Meraki solution.

Meraki Dashboard is stable; I have not had any occurrence of issues.

The scalability of Meraki Dashboard is quite good; it is very scalable.

The customer support from Meraki has been excellent. I have tried customer support from Cisco's Meraki TAC, and they are reliable. I commend them for ensuring that any issue is resolved or handed over properly if they are off duty.

I would rate the customer support a perfect 10.

I have not previously used a different solution because I have been using Meraki in my previous company, so it is something that I introduced when I moved.

I have seen a return on investment primarily in time saved because troubleshooting takes less time. I have minimal IT support doing troubleshooting for our on-site staff using Meraki Dashboard, which probably saves us around half a day of work doing initial troubleshooting if I use that dashboard.

I have not handled pricing, setup cost, and licensing myself, but I know I am doing the licensing for three-year terms. I have not yet renewed my subscription, or I might have for the last three years, but it is not yet time for renewal.

I would rate Meraki Dashboard a nine. I think nine is a good gauge as I have not thought of any improvement; it is not perfect, but I am happy with that.

Meraki Dashboard is deployed in my organization as a public cloud.

For our public cloud deployment, I have local providers in the Philippines, including Telstra. I also have PLDT, Globe, and Converge, which gives me a lot of options.

My advice for others looking into using Meraki Dashboard is that it would simplify business operations, providing a lot of insights that would essentially make support faster and more excellent, so it is something I would recommend.