At 3:00 a.m., you get a call from the production supervisor at your company. He says, “Hey! The network is down.” We can’t do any!” You sigh and hang up. Now you are ready to head in, ready to put out another fire. This scenario is all too familiar for IT admins and operational teams. Many enterprise network solutions make it difficult for engineers and operations to keep up with the network’s happenings every day. The Cisco Meraki Dashboard is available.
Meraki dashboard contains a wealth of useful reports that aggregate real-time telemetry from network devices. These reports can be used for troubleshooting live issues, planning for additional capacity, or understanding the network topology.
Engineers can quickly identify client traffic through the client monitor dashboard. Operations teams have a clear view of the network and its components with the summary report. Engineers can access more detailed dashboards, such as packet captures or event logs, to gain a lower-level view of network operations and reduce the time it takes to recover from network outages. The cloud-native network features are combined into a powerful network management system. This includes a universal change log, a firmware updating dashboard, as well as an event log. This is Cisco Meraki’s cloud networking power.
Let’s take a quick tour of how to interpret different Cisco Meraki dashboards. This is something that will benefit all network administrators, especially those who work at Cisco shops.
Client Monitor Dashboard
When you log into Cisco Meraki dashboard, the primary page that you will be greeted with is the client monitor page. You can view the most recent connected client devices and their status. The report includes information such hostname, MAC address and IP address. Data points are gathered from security appliances, switches, wireless access points over internet to feed the client monitoring systems.
How to use the Client Monitor Dashboard
This view allows you to quickly identify client devices and make decisions based on real-time data. The client monitor, for example, allows you to identify devices that consume large amounts of bandwidth. This insight can be used to throttle busy clients to allow more traffic to other devices. This dashboard can also be used to identify clients experiencing connectivity issues, such as latency or media types, mismatches or IP address conflicts, and other.
The customizable columns in client view offer a variety of options including Operating System, Performance and Last Seen, CDP/LLDP and many other.
The client monitor dashboard allows you to whitelist devices such as servers in the Cisco Advanced security service to ensure they can be connected when troubleshooting.
Summary Report
Network operators’ dream is the summary dashboard. It is located under the “Organization” tab in the “Monitor” section. This summary report contains all the information you need about a network’s throughput and bandwidth categories, device usage metrics, and other data points.
How to use the Summary Report
This report is very useful when you are trying to get a quick overview of a network or to identify potential problems or opportunities. Summary reports can show trends over time which is useful for device lifecycle management and network capacity planning. Administrators can even see which client operating systems connect to their network and what traffic they are generating.
The summary report is a great tool to share information with other stakeholders about network status, capacity, traffic patterns, and customizations. It also includes export features and scheduled recurring emails reports. Summary reports provide insight into network performance and allow admins to identify bottlenecks or limitations within the i.