We performed a comparison between Kentik and Meraki Dashboard based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in Network Monitoring Software."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The most valuable features have been anything around traffic engineering: being able to determine the source or destination of a surge of traffic, whether it's DDoS-related, or a customer just happened to have a sudden uptick in traffic. Being able to tell where that's coming from or where it's going to enables us to do things based on that."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"In terms of the solution’s real-time visibility across our network infrastructure, I have not been able to find any other monitoring or netflow visualization tool that gives me the kind of information I get from Kentik. If I need to take a deep-dive into something that I see, it's really easy for me to do that. Whereas with most other things, I have to use five or six other tools to get that kind of data, with Kentik, I have it all in one place."
"We're also using Kentik to ingest metrics. It's a useful feature, and its response time, whenever we're pulling back the data, is higher than our on-prem solution."
"I really love the Data Explorer. I use it all the time to go in and craft exactly what I need to see. I'm able to then take that story and explain it to the executives. I've done that a couple of times and it is helpful."
"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"Meraki Dashboard centralizes control of all our equipment into one cloud-based console, so we can manage it from anywhere. We can resolve problems remotely outside of business hours because it is on the cloud. You can use the dashboard to change security settings or configure routers and switches."
"What I love most about the Meraki Dashboard are its user-friendly features."
"We greatly utilize the network because we can plug it into the DNS, VPN, or equipment. It's very good. Meraki Dashboard enhances wireless network management. We appreciate its flexibility, as it allows for easy suite configuration. We can handle everything on there when there's a policy or any other requirement."
"The solution scales well."
"It's a simple, functional solution."
"Everything is in a single pane and you can look at your network in one centralized place."
"Some of the features I have found valuable are the ease of access, simple configuration, and monitoring."
"An excellent dashboard that is currently unique in covering both SD-WAN and SD-LAN with built-in security."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."
"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important."
"We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"The only downside to Kentik, something that I don't like, is that it's great that it shows you where these anomalies lie, but it's not actionable. Kentik is valuable, don't get me wrong, but if it had an actionable piece to it..."
"They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may a need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing."
"There is room for improvement around the usability of the API. It's a hugely complex task to call it and you need a lot of backing to be able to do it. I should say, as someone who's not in networking, maybe it's easier for people who are in networking, but for me that one part is not very user-friendly."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"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 wait time to speak with a Meraki support engineer is always long, but they get the job done."
"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."
"Third-party switches do not necessarily integrate easily with the system and this could be improved to allow for better adaptation."
"What we would like from the IT perspective is a lot more granular control, more visibility into the packets, into the routing, and things of that nature."
"Meraki lacks their own software for connecting to the VPN which creates some issues."
"The product is missing a VPN and it is a major issue when it comes to deployment."
"Meraki Dashboard could improve integration with non-Cisco platforms."
Kentik is ranked 47th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews while Meraki Dashboard is ranked 9th in Network Monitoring Software with 51 reviews. Kentik is rated 9.2, while Meraki Dashboard is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Kentik writes " Flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility is a definite strength". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Meraki Dashboard writes "Incredibly easy to use, great troubleshooting and prevention of malicious events". Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, SolarWinds NPM, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Datadog, whereas Meraki Dashboard is most compared with SolarWinds NPM, ThousandEyes, Cisco DNA Center, Mist AI and Cloud and Zabbix.
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