Meraki Dashboard Reviews

We use Meraki Dashboard for troubleshooting and configuring networks, statistics, reporting, and monitoring security threats. Our clients' networks depend on it daily, and it's part of our core business model.

We can remotely monitor clients' networks through Meraki Dashboard, dramatically reducing the on-site visits required. Meraki Dashboard has cut down on personnel costs because it requires fewer people to support. 

It also helps us stay on top of potential problems, which keeps our clients happy. We get critical notifications ahead of time, so we know about the issues before our clients do.

The most critical feature of Meraki Dashboard is its scalability.

Meraki Dashboard is a mature product, so it doesn't have a lot of bugs or significant issues, but would love to have the ability to save configurations externally instead of storing them in the database. 

I've been using Meraki Dashboard for over four years.

Meraki Dashboard is stable. We rarely have significant crashes or downtime. The solution has gone down maybe once in four years.

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. 

The wait time to speak with a Meraki support engineer is always long, but they get the job done. I rate Meraki support eight out of 10. 

Positive

We never based our business on other cloud solutions of that level. We use other products, but I hated the HP solution. There were so many glitches. Unfortunately, we have to deal with it from time to time because of existing clients, but that's not what I would recommend to anybody.

I rate Meraki Dashboard eight out of 10 for ease of deployment. It's straightforward to deploy Meraki Dashboard at a new site because you can use a template, and it's easy for me, in particular, because I have been using the solution for a long time. 

With a template, it usually takes no longer than 10 minutes if you have all the network equipment ready to go. A full setup from scratch takes about two days. Usually, a single person can set it up but it depends on the number of clients we have. If we have more clients, we might need additional staff to manage and maintain the solution. 

We do the deployment ourselves.

I rate Meraki Dashboard six out of 10 for affordability. The cost depends on the amount of equipment at each site, including switches, access points, firewalls, etc. Meraki's licensing model is per unit per year. At a minimum, it's around $500 for the smallest networks.

I rate Meraki Dashboard nine out of 10. It's one of the best products on the market, but there's always room for improvement. More convenient licensing and faster technical support would probably bring it up to a perfect 10. 

If you plan to implement Meraki Dashboard, I recommend first creating a structure that you can replicate. It's much easier to support that way because there's already an internal structure. If you have consistency in naming devices, ports, etc., it will help you search data to identify ports and troubleshoot.

I use Meraki Dashboard for teachers' inventory, configuration, troubleshooting, reports, and management.

The most valuable features are that it's easy to use and technically very complete. I can configure, do advanced troubleshooting in the dashboard, and reboot access points remotely.

More integration would be an improvement - for example, I can manage the Cisco Meraki access point but not the Cisco access point.

I've been using this solution for almost ten years.

Meraki Dashboard's stability is very good.

Meraki Dashboard is very scalable.

Meraki's technical support is very good.

Positive

I previously used Motorola and Aerohive. We switched from Aerohive because it was hard to work, confusing, and not user-friendly.

The initial setup was hard work because we had to implement more than 1000 access points in more than 70 independent networks. However, with the implementations done, I can now implement a new network in around ten minutes.

The first implementation was done using a partner.

The price could be lower because the license for access points is expensive. We pay almost $5000 for a three-year contract with Dashboard included.

We evaluated Fortinet.

I would rate Meraki Dashboard ten out of ten.

The primary use is to have centralized control over all the Meraki devices and services on your network. Primarily I use it for security configuration and reporting.  

Very intuitive, complete overview of entire network including branch offices. Ability to drill down into events and alerts and lookup in the knowledge-base. Create tickets and track them.

I think that the most valuable part about the dashboard is the analytics. A firm that I was doing some IT consulting work for was hit with a ransomware attack and this thing was amazing. After we got things cleaned up, we found that the actors had some IP numbers somewhere on the West Coast. They started to try to get back into the network and Meraki was there to say, "You know what? This same malicious IP number is knocking at your door again." We were able to take care of that and block them off so they could not access the network and that problem was put to rest.

The biggest problem is the absence of a VPN client like AnyConnect with the device. The Meraki rep that I dealt with actually agreed. He said a lot of people are complaining about the fact that they had to work with a separate VPN.  

Here is the problem. Let's say you have got to deploy and install a VPN client on 50 workstations. You physically have to go to every one of the 50 workstations and do the VPN deployment manually. You can not just push it out through an email or a group policy. That means you have to touch every machine and configure it based on the type of network card it has and make a whole bunch of other settings.  

Manually deploying the VPN is about a 20-minute procedure and that is after you learn how to do it. By comparison, if I wanted to roll out 1000 VPN clients with a normal Cisco device, the Cisco AnyConnect software can be just pushed out with some easy instructions and away you go.  

I think the VPN client is really the only true issue I had with the product itself. The connection that I get from home is sometimes a little shaky when I have to use it remotely, but it is impossible to put the blame on that connection as due to Meraki.  

I have been using this product for about a year.  

We never had any issues at all with the stability of Meraki. It is self-healing. If the power goes out or whatever, it is very good at handling that kind of issue. It is easy to learn, easy to read the reports, and it is easy to use the dashboard.  

I had worked with Fortinet and some other firewalls — Linksys of course, going all the way back to the old WatchGuard. I think Meraki really kicked off the whole cloud-based managed device movement and everyone else is just hopping on to do the same kind of thing. SonicWall and Fortinet and all the other newer competitors just followed along when they figured it was something valuable. If Meraki could get their VPN sorted out, I think they would have themselves a flagship product that was really the leader of the pack.  

I have not really had the opportunity to test the scalability first-hand. We were are a small office, so I never really got a chance to try and add hundreds of users. If that had been the case, Meraki probably would have suggested that we go to the next model up because we needed a more robust system.

The configuration of the VPN between branche offices was wonderful. You just click on the address and it basically does everything itself. For a non-engineer type person, pretty much anybody in IT can configure these things once you do the webinar. It is easy and intuitive and as far as I have been able to work with the scalability, I think a lot of the product.  

When I did get to engage the technical support people at Meraki, I would give them a 10-out-of-10. The technical support was great.  

I have been working with firewalls for a long time. I worked with the Cisco 5500 series. I worked with a lot of their older stuff back in the day. Mostly my job for the previous 10 years was not to be the supplier and was not the implementer. Rather I was more of a consultant, so I never really had the opportunity to get the hands-on experience I have now.  

The setup had a few different stages to take care of. The first step was to create a VPN, a branch office connection, and then a better sister location. I bought another MX to act as a backup, so we had that configured as a hot spot or a failover. Then I configured the VPN so that users would be able to work from home. That VPN configuration is probably the one thing that I did not much like about the product. It almost makes no sense that it does not have its own VPN client. You have to use the Microsoft VPN client, which is a bit of a pain. If it has to be that way there surely has to be a better way to integrate it.  

With the main Cisco stuff, you just download the VPN client and it has got your anti-virus component and your VPN client. That is just not the case with Meraki. I know they have been talking about trying to work that out and get that installed. Right now it is a sorta major glitching point.  

I did not configure the product originally. Somebody else did it and they did not configure it very well. For example, there is a feature to protect against ransomware and that feature was not even turned on in the device. After I realized it was not working optimally, I got together with the Meraki folks and they got in there and reconfigured it. It became a true AI device at that point. There were really a lot of things wrong with the initial configuration, but that ransomware piece was a pretty major feature to miss.  

After Meraki helped me reconfigure everything, I felt much more comfortable after that. It was done by one of their resellers and I guess I should have gone that way out of the gate.  

For a small MX 64, it is maybe $300 to $400 a year. It is nothing really outrageous. I was originally put off that you had to pay for a subscription, but I am a veteran thinking back 10 years ago when there was no such thing as subscriptions. Now just about everything seems to be going that route.  

I could see a firewall device and that is sort of comforting. I do not agree with the solution being like a switch and virtually invisible. Like you could have a switch-up in the ceiling somewhere that nobody knows is there. Then all of a sudden it gets tripped and just stops working. You don't see a device go down. But again, it is not just Meraki that is going with the subscription scheme. It is also other companies like SonicWall. They are all going to subscription-based licensing.  

For small businesses, I would recommend Meraki over pretty much anything else on the market.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is worst and ten is the best, I would rate Meraki Dashboard as an eight-out-of-ten.  

Meraki is a networking device which is cloud managed. It's a kind of software defined networking device. You connect to it via the cloud and then you have some dashboard services available from the cloud provider, from Meraki. We have traditional networking devices and we use Meraki for other purposes. I'm the company manager of network services for Europe, India, and Africa and we're a customer of Meraki. 

I like that there is great visibility on the dashboard and you immediately see when something is going down. If you want to dive deeper and get more details you can. Because this is a cloud solution, you have everything configured and there's nothing we really need to configure ourselves to get the information we need.

I've been using this solution for six years. 

I find the solution very scalable. We have both internal and external users. Internally, we have five admins and externally we have about 1,000 users. Because it's outsourced, we probably have around 40 administrators who can log into the system, due to our 24/7 support model. We have approximately 20 locations here in Europe and Russia which are my responsibility, and there are probably maybe 200 end users behind that.

technical support? Are you satisfied? Not satisfied with anything?

Alexander: Yes, I'm satisfied.

The initial setup is very straightforward, it probably took a few hours to set up the first devices. After that it goes very quickly. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We use Meraki Dashboard to manage all our Cisco Meraki network equipment, SD-WAN, firewalls, DHCP, routers, switches, etc. We have firewalls at three locations, and each site has about 200 users.  

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. 

Meraki Dashboard could improve integration with non-Cisco platforms. 

I have used Meraki Dashboard for about seven years.

Meraki Dashboard is stable. 

It isn't hard to set up Meraki Dashboard if you have some experience with Cisco solutions. You need some knowledge about networks and firewall rules. We just followed the manual. 

I rate Meraki Dashboard 10 out of 10. It's the best solution. 

For some clients, it helps to go over the graph of throughput and utilization with the client looking at a per-machine utilization. They can see, "Are we hitting the cap? Is it time for growth?" Or, "I thought there was no usage, yet now you're showing me there was a high usage, so let's investigate what was using the network." The graphing that was provided on the dashboard was helpful in those ways.

It's a simple, functional solution. 

The solution can scale. 

It is stable and reliable. 

It would go against the philosophy of Meraki since Meraki prides itself on being clean and simple, and functional. However, 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. That would be more helpful.

I've been using the solution for more than five years. 

The solution is very stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's scalable, as in you can build upon it and add more locations and things like that. However, in complexity, it is not scalable.

We have witnessed an ROI while using the solution. 

You do pay a premium, and that premium is only worth it if the simplicity of the dashboard brings you an advantage. However, if the simplicity doesn't bring you an advantage, then this product might not be for you.

We use different versions of the solution. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. We enjoy its capabilities for the most part. 

We're using Meraki Dashboard for warehouse management, particularly for deploying Meraki solutions, for example: Meraki wireless connections in our company.

I like that Meraki Dashboard is a user-friendly product.

What needs improvement in Meraki Dashboard is its configuration.

What I'd like added in the next release of Meraki Dashboard is more functionality.

Meraki Dashboard is a stable product.

Meraki Dashboard has good scalability.

Meraki Dashboard provides good technical support.

Setting up Meraki Dashboard was easy.

We are Cisco partners.

My clients use the new version of Meraki Dashboard.

We have seven engineers who are responsible for the deployment and maintenance of Meraki Dashboard.

I would recommend the product to someone who's new to it, or to someone planning on using it.

My rating for Meraki Dashboard is ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for small and medium-sized organizations. 

It's an easy-to-use product. It's really user-friendly. The product is not really hard to understand. There is so much information relative to the device, and the connected device, or a non-active line, or something like that.

The user interface is great. It's quite simple. 

It's very stable. 

The initial implementation process is simple.

I can't speak to what needs to be improved. I'm pretty satisfied with it. 

There needs to be a better way of identifying some hardware. For example, there is some hardware where only the mask address is available - not the full name. There needs to be more improvement on the device-connected interface.

We've been using the solution for one and a half years.

The stability of the solution is great. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. 

We have 150 users on the solution right now.

I've never used technical support in the past. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

The initial setup is not a difficult process. It's pretty easy. That said, it depends on the internet connection.

We have three technical teams that are capable of handling the deployment process. They are compromised of managers and two engineers. 

If the contact gives us all the information we need, then we can handle the implementation alone.

I cannot recall how long it took to deploy the product.

There might be an additional subscription fee.

I would recommend the solution to other users and companies. I've been pretty satisfied with its capabilities so far.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten overall.