What needs improvement with Meraki Dashboard?

Improving the AI capabilities would be beneficial as the machine should learn more extensively. The future is AI-driven. Network availability is crucial based on machine understanding, so the machine should learn to that extent. Improving AI could be a significant role-changer for many aspects. Scalability has some limitations as they are not enterprise-ready, and large hyper-scale networks may not be possible on Meraki Dashboard. It needs to be a physical network.

I would like to enhance some security policies and configure AMP, which means endpoint security policies to scan for malware and phishing attacks, and I want to ensure we can see the sorts of policies we have and the kinds of operations we can undertake. I would like to enhance my expertise on Cisco Umbrella and Cisco M, which is an endpoint security management tool, and FTD is a very crucial part of Meraki Dashboard for managing all systems, so these are the three areas I would focus on enhancing.

The aspect I find challenging about this solution is that it is too extensive and complex. For example, when comparing Meraki Dashboard to Juniper Mist, the latter is quite simple. Mist is a very advanced, technological solution, but it is very straightforward. It provides many insights out of the box without any need to search for them. While the visibility in Meraki Dashboard is good, the solution is too heavy and complex.

There is a need for price reductions in developing countries, as the cost of Meraki is quite high. Additionally, it would be beneficial if Meraki Dashboard could integrate more Cisco devices such as Cisco Firepower and routers.

They could improve the product by providing enhanced utilization reports and more detailed independent access reports.

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.

There could be an on-premise server for the dashboard. Meraki can download the full server from the cloud to on-prem for the client. It will be beneficial to get new insight and new options. It will be an innovation for Meraki. Other cloud providers provide this feature.

Meraki Dashboard's pricing could be improved. Price has become a very real issue in our economy right now. Any product is worth considering if it can help you save some money and still get quality equipment. Meraki Dashboard could do a little better in the planning stage regarding heat map creation. Once the solution is deployed, you can utilize a heat map capability within Meraki, which is pretty good. However, the pre planning stage is very difficult because you'd have to get a third-party vendor and get their software.

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. A feature that can conduct band analysis and provide information about deadlines and related details would be beneficial. Repeatedly rebooting devices due to errors can disrupt operations, so it's not recommended. However, there are times when it's necessary to reboot access points or switches. The process of scheduling a reboot can be cumbersome, as it involves using the API and building a pipeline script through the console. This adds another layer of complexity to managing and supporting the system.

This solution can be quite complicated to configure and manage, unless you have a technical person with specific knowledge working on it.

Sometimes the system crashes. We need them to offer better stability. When this happens, we cannot access some of the switches in the network. We can only reach them after multiple attempts. It would be nicer if the dashboard was lighter. They need to reduce the CPU usage. We'd like it if the dashboard showed everything on the network, even things from other vendors, like HP or Dell.

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'd like to see an alert notification for the mail box so that an administrator will know when to check it. We sometimes have IP or DNS issues. If a user doesn't come to the office for a couple of days, it can sometimes take 20 minutes for them to connect their laptop when they return.

Just my password, but that's because I forget it from time to time, but the recovery process is far too simple. I would like to receive decent notification alerts regarding the license's expiry. Or any help on correcting or optimizing licenses, because in certain circumstances you can add a license but it's the wrong licensing. However, the Dashboard adds the license in some way, and you do not utilize it. You can simply extend the license's expiration date.

Monitoring overload is an area that can be improved. I would like to see an alert event feature that monitors what users are downloading and how to block some applications.

The downside to the simplicity is that you can't get as granular as you could with the Cisco APs. They don't have a command line interface, or CLI, so you can't just go into the CLI and copy and paste a bunch of commands. You have to do it through the dashboard. That would be the biggest downside. Their biggest improvement needs to be their documentation. With Cisco, for example, you can just Google whatever image your controller is on. You can say, "I want an 8.5 config guide," and they will give you a PDF that goes from A to Z, with everything you need to know in one place for that software image. You can just open up the guide, do a search for whatever you're looking for, and boom, it'll take you to it. Meraki, on the other hand, does not do that, so if you want to learn anything, you kind of have to know what it is you're looking for to begin with. It's just a webpage database of articles and you've got to basically find what you're looking for. I would love to just have a guide for each software release as opposed to me having to hunt it out.

It is a little bit expensive. Maybe sometimes they just need to add some more integration to not be a hundred percent Cisco. For example, with Cisco Umbrella, if they could integrate, let's say, Palo Alto or some other third-party devices on the API, not on the VPN channel, that would be great. Some features could be added.

I can’t recall needing anything specific to be improved. Maybe in six months, we might have a different opinion. I’d like the product to allow for other solutions to be integrated with the dashboard as well.

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.

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. It would be very helpful if next to a lot of the settings, they had a button you could click on, and it would explain what that setting actually does and how it affects your network. Particularly when you're in the dashboard and particularly when you're looking at wireless networks, they have so many advanced options and they're hard to understand. A lot of people don't know what beacon intervalling is or even basic things like channels. Meraki has good documentation on their website, but if it was better linked with the dashboard, it would make it a lot simpler. Small businesses that we deal with use Ubiquiti. In their dashboard, next to every setting you can see what that setting does, which is really helpful. DrayTek is like that as well. We always employ a third party who knows the system inside and out. If you apply it yourself, it would take you forever. From my perspective, that would be the number one thing I would want to see improved as a high-level person, because it would save us a lot of money if we didn't have to employ a third party.

Meraki Dashboard could improve the user interface by making it more user-friendly. The configuration can at times be difficult. Also their support team could be better with response times.

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.

The client VPN could use some help, but that's probably partially Microsoft's fault because of the Windows client for VPNs, which keeps changing. Meraki don't have their own software for connecting to the VPN so you have to use the Windows one. It would be great for them to create a client for users to install to connect to the client VPN server. It's one of the biggest complaints about Meraki.

There are some issues with the NAT configuration, it is now impossible to some operations with the solution. I would like to see a VPN feature in a future release that supports tunnelling.

Overall, the dashboard is already quite good. However, a few popular improvements that could be suggested include user-based tracking and user-based location tracking. If a client could add those things on, on top of whatever they're using, that would be ideal. For example, within a building, if I am a user and I have a seat on the fourth floor, if I move across the building, the system should be able to track me and should be able to figure out my whereabouts or my position within the building if I'm connected to the wireless. That would make the administrator's life easier in terms of reachability. There should be a certain amount of visibility in terms of security validation, or vulnerability assessment. If that can be incorporated, that would be great. For example, in a single dashboard, you could be getting security incidents, so you could better be able to understand your readiness from the security perspective.

There is a bit of a problem when you try to log in and you don't have a fixed IP address. If you're granting access, you need to log in by using the IP address. If your administrator's IP address is not a fixed IP address and it has changed, you might need to update the changed IP address in the interface. For this, you need to log in to the interface to update the IP address. This issue might not have so much to do with Meraki interface.

They can improve the landing page in Meraki Dashboard. When I go into an organization, they can include a lot more infographics. They can also simplify it a bit and consolidate it. For example, if I've got five branches and I go into customer A's profile or organization, I'd like to see an infographic on the landing page providing a snippet of the entire network layout, that is, all branches in one snapshot. From there, I would like to go into the network that I want to work on or view.

The initial setup is complex and can be made more straightforward. The scalability can be improved.

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.

We would like to be able to test the health of WAN connections.

I don't think that Cisco needs or wants to improve Meraki. Meraki was acquired by Cisco, and Cisco knows exactly what they wanted from the product. This product is only fitting for small to medium business. In order to work with large corporate enterprises, they have acquired another company that will help them provide an enterprise solution. That's why they are not going to improve Meraki. If they were going to try to scale the application of Meraki to enterprise solutions it would not be a good fit. Both of the Cisco products don't yet support layer 2 MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching). The only vendor I know of today that is supporting MPLS is Nokia. None of Cisco products supporting that protocol, so I think this is a gap in Cisco products.

Something that needs to be improved, is the fact that you if you don't renew the subscription license, it stops working. I would also like to see SSL BPM support for anything else.

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.

Probably the thing that could use the most improvement is the terminal monitor issues on ports. According to Meraki support, we need a third-party program to integrate other, non-Meraki switches if they don't have that integrator already. It is not a problem with the Meraki switches, of course.

The one issue that we have had is that the VPN tunnel would go down unless you worked out with the ISP that you would be using a static IP address on the WAN interface. If you're allowed to just be dynamic then whenever the port and IP changes, it will break the VPN connection and it does not always come back up. Our ISP has the dynamic IP addresses change on a cycle, so this was a problem for us.

The MDM needs improvement. I know that we used to use the MDM for a long time, for one or two years, but we had to leave it because it wasn't really good enough for us. THe MDM should be improved.

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

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.

The pricing for this solution needs to be improved.