What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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 is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Meraki Dashboard for about seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Meraki Dashboard does grow with the needs of my organization.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
On a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I rate Meraki Dashboard overall as a seven.