Cisco Meraki is a cloud-based IT management solution that helps you manage, configure, and troubleshoot an entire network from anywhere, eliminating the need of an on-site hardware controller. You can log in using one set of credentials to access your entire network infrastructure, and it has built-in software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology that offers more security, simplified management, and high availability with optimized usage of resources.
Once connected to the internet, your network's hardware devices automatically check in to the Meraki cloud and download their configurations. Meraki also allows multiple sites to connect to the cloud application at once, making it easy for organizations that have their sites at multiple locations.
These features sound great at first, until you consider the fact that most organizations contain thousands of dependent devices that can go faulty at any time, which makes it a tedious job to detect a faulty device and drill down to its root cause. But problems like these can be handled with the help of good network monitoring software that offers extensive Cisco Meraki monitoring.
OpManager's Cisco network monitoring allows you discover and monitor Cisco Meraki controllers including their availability, health, efficiency, and performance. Once Cisco Meraki network monitoring is enabled, any anomalies or faults with the devices connected to a Cisco Meraki controller can be detected, drilled down to its root cause, and rectified instantly.
OpManager offers a complete all-inclusive inventory for monitoring Cisco Meraki Organization with service set identifier (SSID) mapping and in-depth monitoring of associated entities such as Meraki Security (MX), Meraki Switch (MS), Meraki Radio (MK), Meraki Cellular Gateway (MG), Meraki Vision (MV), access points, SSIDs, clients, nodes, and ports.
The Meraki controller summary page gives you all necessary information and detailed Cisco Meraki performance monitoring statistics, including the overall health of the controller, the access point, networks, and clients count. The summary page also displays other important information such as:
The 'All Devices' section provides visibility into all the end devices such as switches, firewalls, cellular gateways, radios, and Vision devices that are a part of the discovered Meraki controller. By default, all these entities are monitored for availability via the controller.
On enabling advanced Meraki SNMP monitoring, you will be able to monitor additional performance metrics of all associated entities such as client details (for radio devices) and port status (for switches). This will help network administrators identify devices that are faulty and fix them at once. Other functions such as interface discovery, monitoring the interface availability and bandwidth, associating notification profiles (email, SMS, trap profile, and more) can also be performed for all individual entities, including switches, firewalls, radios, Vision devices, and gateways. Monitor Meraki SNMP effortlessly with OpManager's network monitoring capabilities.
OpManager automatically discovers all available networks associated with the Meraki controller, which helps in maintaining a more organized inventory view for better usability. You can select between the discovered networks, and view the number of devices in that particular network. Rediscovering the controller will update new networks if detected.
In addition, the Topology View option gives you a complete map-like representation of the various devices in each network of the discovered Meraki controller. This helps you know the interconnections between the various devices in the selected network.
Rogue SSIDs are unauthorized SSIDs detected by the access points in a network. The topology view includes the SSID name, the network it belongs to, the channel number, and the time at which the access point was detected by the controller. This rogue SSID data is periodically fetched by a controller and updated automatically upon rediscovery of the Meraki organization.
The clients tab displays the number of devices connected to the Meraki Radio, i.e the number of wireless devices connected to that particular network in the Meraki controller. This page offers a range of information such as network name, radio (wireless) device name, number of clients connected, speed, and the total usage (Tx/Rx bytes) of each wireless device connected to the network.
OpManager offers a list of customized reports exclusively for Cisco Meraki controller. You can also generate or schedule custom reports to measure the performance, availability, and efficiency of the Meraki controller or its associated entities. The available reports are:
These reports can be generated for individual parameters or scheduled by configuring a specific rule.
OpManager also provides various default and custom dashboards specific to Meraki controllers. These dashboards will help you keep an eye on the critical metrics of the discovered controller by setting it as your default home page.
OpManager generates availability and network monitoring alerts when a fault is detected in the discovered device and its entities or in the network. You can configure various thresholds, such as the severity and time span, for any associated parameter, and OpManager will raise alerts when the device is down or if the thresholds are violated.
In addition, various notification profiles can be associated to the controller and entities to notify the network administrator. These notification profiles can also be set to perform a specific action when an alert is generated from the controller.
If you want to see additional Cisco Meraki monitoring features implemented in OpManager, we would love to hear from you. Click here to submit your response.
