Meraki Dashboard Reviews

We acquired more than two hundred and fifty Meraki APs as part of a multi-site acquisition. We bought the licensing, stood up a Meraki Dashboard and imported the APs into our Dashboard. A super easy transition of the Wireless LAN.

There is no need to swap the hardware at all the locations, and importing the APs into the Dashboard was a simple and quick process. Building the environment in the Dashboard was quick as well. Overall, the changeover was painless from the wireless standpoint.

Cloud management is nice and easy. There are no controllers to deal with upgrading and maintaining. It is easy to see all of the devices are online, and if not, which ones are down.

I am concerned about the fact that once your licensing expires the devices stop working and become a brick.

The primary use is with the Managed Service Provider Dashboard. I work for an ISP, and we provide Meraki solutions to our customers.

In terms of the operation side, the Meraki Dashboard has made it much easier to use and configure from one place. There are tools embedded in the dashboard to troubleshoot, instead of looking at various network elements, you just have the one dashboard to view everything.

The feature I find most valuable is the single pane of glass where you can configure a monitor view, all from one dashboard. For example, on the wireless side, you can configure it under the configuration panel, and then view statistics like location analytics, user analytics, etc.

The product can be improved around the captive portal portion. It may be helpful to have maybe some popups or blurbs that just guide you in terms of how to use it or explain what a certain input means. Also, for example, the summary dashboard is under Organization, instead of under Network and sometimes it gets confusing where to actually find the summary dashboard. 

For me, from a usability or user journey perspective, it can be a bit more intuitive. For example, I want to see the summary from my Network but I have to go to Organization. Also the guides: they are great, but it's very difficult to find user guides, specifically on how to use every single feature. If I have to draw up the user guide, it's quite difficult to find the content. And maybe something which is connected with the support, or the price, or something like that. Or functionality, like more features.

I find the stability of the Meraki Dashboard very reliable and stable. It's got the built-in mechanisms like warm spares, automatic solar, from my side, it's been very reliable. I've always been able to connect to the dashboard. There haven't been any outages. We haven’t had any stability issues.

In terms of scalability, we are planning to roll it out to the rest of our 400 stores. We've only got one solution that's live right now, which is a combination of their security appliance, which is an access point. For the Wi-Fi, many of the guests who come through the store are using it. The internal staff is using the Wi-Fi and the LAN. It's the store that sells our product, and they're using the full stack of Meraki right now.

The technical support that I've experienced so far has been very good. The guys used to literally log the ticket on the dashboard, and they answer us. It's normally back within a day or so, so they've been very helpful.

Before Meraki Dashboard, we didn't previously use a different solution. From my side, I haven't used anything else. But the technical teams have used the traditional Cisco RSR's, and their Aironet Wi-Fi solution, and it's significantly more difficult to deploy those solutions.

The initial setup was very, very intuitive and easy to use, in terms of installation. We've mainly worked on the wireless access point, but there's education that's starting to happen within the NSP environment. You need to get the guys up to speed. And this is a very different way of configuring and doing things, that's the learning journey, but once we actually are up to speed on how to use it, it's much quicker than the traditional use cases. They defined all the test cases and use cases that they'd want to test after deploying. It was pretty successful from the Meraki side, but internally, it was the education side that was lacking because the guys didn't fully understand how to use it, at that stage. And that's why it took so long to deploy.

For the implementation, we ourselves did the POC, but we did have a representative from Meraki here that was guiding us for about a week.

From a pricing perspective, they are still expensive. 

Before choosing we didn't really evaluate other options. The guys are used to using it, but in terms of troubleshooting, they have to access many different systems. The reason why we did a POC with Meraki is because the sales representative came down to visit MTN. There's a Cisco partnership that's in place. They gave us the solution of Meraki and the objective. There was a rationale behind why we should do this POC, and that's why they moved. It was more of a selling initiative. They sold the solution to MTN, so we didn't choose it because the other solutions were not working, it was a sale.

Regarding this solution, there are a few additional comments: from my side, because I'm a managed service provider, and we sell and manage services to our customer, I feel what's lacking right now is the technical training to up skill and manage the service provider. In South Africa, a lot of training is not available. In terms of technical training, there's none of that, apart from the CMNO training.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is to provide a wireless and networking solution for the office or home. I use it at home and at work. 

It has improved my organization in the way that we've got a much better wireless coverage than we had before, and secondly, we have the visibility of all the users.

The most valuable features would be its ease of use and the easy integration.

You can't really clone or replicate a device, that sort of feature would be useful. You can clone the site but you cannot clone the device.

As far as I know, it is very stable. 

The scalability is unlimited. You can scale as much as you want, at least for the environment that I'm in. We don't have thousands, we've only got under ten. It's right for our organization. I think scalability-wise it's capable of scaling up to around 200, maybe a couple thousand. It's all cloud based so we don't control anything.

We have around 45 users using this solution. Their roles are primarily developers. We only require one staff member for the deployment and maintenance which is me. 

It is used in the office environment and if we get more people joining us, we might need more Meraki access points and maybe more filters. 

Technical support is pretty good. They come back to me with the answers or at least help me with how to get answers.

We switched to Meraki from Fortinet. We switched because it was not easy to manage. 

The initial setup was straightforward. The guys from the Meraki website were quite good.

The deployment took a few minutes but the congregation took a couple of days. 

I did the deployment myself.

Licensing is around under 1000 pounds. The licensing is either one year, three years, five years or ten years and during the licensing, we can choose to renew it per year or per every three years. We've got a license for three years. It's about 160 or about 200 pounds each.

I would advise someone considering this solution to go for it. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case for this solution is network security and reporting.

This solution has improved our organization by centralizing control of multiple clients and sites.

The most valuable feature is their support, and they get better every day.

The pricing for this solution needs to be improved.

In my previous employment, I used to deploy Meraki solutions for retail stores. They really liked the the Presence analytics feature. Basically, they could tell how many clients came into each store and how many clients came out, using the MAC addresses, not some kind of analog solution. So not only could they know how many clients came in and came out, but also how many returning customers came to each location. They could take that data and match it up with the other locations, and get a lot of marketing information from that too.

In addition to Presence analytics, Layer 7 filtering allowed me to filter connectivity by service and not by port. Also Easy VPN connectivity between the Merakis, multiple SSID configurations, plus I could segregate one SSID from another. One more feature I would add is Facebook integration. 

It improved the marketing solution of the company where I deployed it and it improved the way they gather marketing data tremendously. Instead of sending emails to customers with their old access-point solution, each client that came into the store - by checking into the store, they could connect right away to Wi-Fi - the store could get a lot of the social media data from their clients. That's how they got automatic marketing going, by the clients checking into Facebook. So their friends could see right away their check-ins, and so on.

It's funny, because these are solutions that are more in the marketing area rather than the network, but there's no other solution that provides this.

The process of getting licensing can be a little bit painful, especially if you're doing it each year. The customer support could also take a while to get on the line.

I'd say around five years.

No issues with stability. It was good. Once I deployed it, I totally forgot about it. It did its job, network-wise.

I would say it's about a seven out of 10.

Previously we used a different solution that only offered the ability to get emails from customers, and this provided a much better solution for a retail environment.

Simple.

Merkaki was there before I was hired, and I'm the one who took it and presented it to my supervisor. From there, I went and presented it to the company where I deployed it. It was a great story. It was only after about two weeks at my new job back then, I brought the solution to my company, and then I sold the solution, configured the solution, designed the solution, and maintained the solution day-to-day. So it was something that I did my own research on.

Look at all the features it has to offer, not only network-wise. For example, the Meraki MR12 is an excellent solution for retail, and you also have a Meraki that has great switches where you can control everything over the cloud, and so on. There are different features that fit well so I'd recommend looking into everything it has to offer, and all the solutions.

I give it a 10 out of 10 because I don't see any other product in the market that offers the same solutions, at least for retail.

The tool's main use case for our logistics company is to manage our global network infrastructure. Employees can connect from any part of the world.

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 tool's real-time monitoring capabilities are good. My experience with the mobile application management features of the Meraki Dashboard has been positive. Recently, a customer raised concerns about excessive bandwidth consumption in their network due to equipment connected to the Meraki dashboard. We quickly identified a new MAC address consuming bandwidth by enabling monitoring within the Meraki dashboard. Within minutes, we could pinpoint the issue and take necessary actions, such as limiting bandwidth or blocking the IP or MAC address from the network.

The tool needs to incorporate more integration platforms. Integrating technical support features directly into the dashboard would be highly beneficial. This would allow technicians to troubleshoot issues more efficiently. 

I have been using the product for seven years. 

I rate the tool's stability a ten out of ten. 

I rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten. 

The tool's deployment is not complex. The deployment process involved assessing the requirements, obtaining necessary permissions for network access, and proceeding with the installation and configuration.

Meraki Dashboard's pricing is reasonable. It is sold yearly, typically for one, three, or five years. I rate its pricing a five out of ten. 

I rate the overall product a ten out of ten. I recommend considering Meraki Dashboard as it offers high security, stability, flexibility, and reasonable pricing.

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 use the product to manage the services for our customers. Some of the customers operate the product themselves to monitor installations.

It is a reliable product. It provides a lot of information that is easy to read.

They could offer API functionality for Meraki Dashboard. It will help us develop software immediately using available solutions.

We have been using Meraki Dashboard for five or six years.

Meraki Dashboard is easy to expand. I rate its scalability a nine out of ten.

The initial process is easy.

It is a cloud-based solution, and we can handle the activity remotely. It is very convenient and easy for customers to monitor their business infrastructure. I rate it an eight out of ten.