Meraki Dashboard pros and cons

Everything is in a single pane and you can look at your network in one centralized place.

What I found most valuable in the Meraki Dashboard is straight monitoring of the different devices, as well as the ability to easily set up VPNs, for example, both Meraki client VPNs and non-Meraki VPNs for different organizations that work with my company. I also like that the tool is a really good firewall.

We like how Meraki Dashboard lets you manage all the devices in a single pane of glass. The dashboard is intuitive and easy to use. They are constantly updating the functionality. Switches from other vendors have the same features for the life of the device, but Meraki is always improving.

We find that Meraki has all the features you need to be able to enable complex network protocols for AV equipment. We deal with a streaming product over IP, and Meraki is fantastic at that.

It's a scalable solution.

Scalability is one of Meraki Dashboard's strongest features. We have thousands of users if we're counting the end-users on our clients' network, but we have hundreds of clients.

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

Meraki Dashboard does not require a lot of maintenance. Cisco tells communicates through the Meraki Dashboard web client, it will automatically send updates to the equipment. They will send you an email on what day the updates will take place. If you want to proceed, you can click on accept, or you can decline them and schedule the updates at another time.

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.

The initial setup was easy.

Meraki lacks their own software for connecting to the VPN which creates some issues.

For my purposes, I don't need to see any other features added to the Meraki Dashboard. I have no criticisms and I do like the tool. If I had a criticism for it, it would be about the pricing because it could be a little less, but again, for the service that you get, I won't complain about that too much.

For instance, you should be able to see if something has been blocked by a firewall rule by looking at a live log of traffic moving through the device. It helps you troubleshoot issues and understand if your rules are working. You need to ensure the firewall is blocking the right things. That's unavailable in the Meraki Dashboard. You have to send the logs to a log server. We use SolarWinds locally, but it's not natively built into Meraki. We're also using Cisco ISA and another tool called Smoothwall.

It's a very complex system. Customers have told me that sometimes there are lots of advanced features that are available and that you can change in the dashboard, but sometimes it's very hard to know what they are.

Some features could be added.

The wait time to speak with a Meraki support engineer is always long, but they get the job done.

The downside to the simplicity is that you can't get as granular as you could with the Cisco APs.

Meraki Dashboard could improve the user interface by making it more user-friendly. The configuring can at times be difficult.

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

The solution can be expensive.