Cisco’s Meraki platform is a great tool to help you become an IT ninja. We’ve discussed the Meraki platform and looked at some dashboards. The question now is “What can the Meraki platform offer to simplify life and improve performance?”
There are almost endless answers. Let’s take a look at some key areas where the Meraki Dashboard can help you get rid of IT problems, be more proactive, and increase scalability reliability and security.
Meraki’s Data-Driven Network Operations
Most IT departments supporting business-facing networks respond to network outages with an email ticket or in-person report. It’s too late. It’s too late. Your business’ ability to make money and get work done has been affected by a network outage.
The recovery process can take a long time because the user report doesn’t contain any details about the actual problem. This is unacceptable, as nearly all employees use computers for some part of their job responsibilities.
Meraki Dashboards and alerts are available for network management. Meraki dashboards and alerts help network teams to overcome issues before they happen. They also increase recovery time by providing actionable insight.
1. Dashboards
Meraki Dashboards are essential for network operations teams that manage multiple networks in many different geographic areas. There are many reasons for network outages. These include loss of power, ISP connectivity or hardware failures. The Meraki dashboard “View All Networks” gives network teams a view at every point of presence, allowing them see at-a glance health for each network they manage:
When a device is down or has other issues, the network health bars appear on this dashboard. To drill down into the issue and determine how to respond, a network administrator can click through this alert.
Network teams would have to create their own solution for central monitoring and alerting without the Meraki dashboard. There are many options, including Prometheus and Grafana, as well as other solutions. These solutions would be costly in terms of licensing, manpower, or both, as well as time and ongoing maintenance.
A self-managed monitoring system that is not managed by you is unlikely to be reliable, especially if it is located in a data center you are monitoring. This further reduces the value proposition for a self-managed network operations system. All of this operational and cost burden is eliminated with the Meraki SaaS platform
2. Alerts
Alerts solve the same problem for network teams as a dashboard, but they don’t have to pay attention on a screen. Instead, you can set up email, SMS, and webhook-based alerts to Microsoft Teams, Slack, and other custom alerting systems, to be notified about issues. This is great for smaller teams that have many other systems to manage. They can focus on the important things in the day and respond to the right issue at right time using data from the alert.
Webhooks are customizable to your liking, so you can also set up automated systems to notify key business personnel about network outages. This could include maintenance teams that might be responsible for cooling and powering data centers and closets.
Meraki is proactive instead of reactive
Many businesses manage critical network infrastructure in a reactive manner. IT teams often wait for hardware failure before replacing it. They also neglect software updates and never restart equipment. There is almost no visibility into the infrastructure as it is in the real world. These tasks are difficult to complete without a central computer.