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Cisco Meraki Dashboard vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Meraki Dashboard

    Score9 out of 10
    N/AAs a cloud-managed network management solution, the Cisco Meraki Dashboard enables users to provision, configure, and troubleshoot global networking and IoT deployments.N/A

    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

    Score10 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is a tool for monitoring, performance management, capacity planning and optimization for on-premises or cloud-based virtual environments. It also integrates with other SolarWinds products.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco Meraki DashboardSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Meraki DashboardSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco Meraki DashboardSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    97%
    Would buy again
    113 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    106 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    112 Answers
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    13 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    79 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    12 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    99%
    Implementation went as expected
    97 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Meraki DashboardSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Small Businesses
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    Medium-sized Companies
    Cisco Catalyst Center
    Score8.5 out of 10
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    Score7.6 out of 10
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    Score7.7 out of 10
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    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Meraki DashboardSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.9
    (116 ratings)
    10.0
    (66 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.2
    (4 ratings)
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    Usability
    8.9
    (115 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.8
    (6 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Meraki DashboardSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    Well suited is if you do configuration one time and roll out to multiple sites, multiple networks, multiple wireless S societies. You create a profile and rollout, and you use automation that takes care of a lot of your manual work. So it's pretty suitable for those divers. Anything related to customization that a Cisco Meraki Dashboard doesn't offer and you use your other automation tool, I think there is an improvement for Cisco Meraki Dashboard to involve all those features and integrate with other third party services.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    On the whole, Solarwinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is an excellent product which gives us a single point to monitor our virtual environment. After our initial trial I was sold on the product and what it had to offer. Immediately after implementing VMAN, we were able to spot virtual machines with old snapshots which were never deleted and no longer needed, we could spot virtual machines which either had over allocated resources or under allocated resources meaning we could make changes and fine tune them for best performance. We could also monitor virtual machine latency, IOPS, and show us where our bottlenecks were.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Cisco
    • Oh, just the ease of use. I am not an IT technical expert by trade—I’m more on the leadership side. So this makes it easy for me to understand everything that is going on and be able to provide an honest review of how the organization is doing at that particular time.
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
    • I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
    • Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
    • Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Cisco
    • Some features are unavailable when the network doesn't have a switch (network topology, for example)
    • I wish there was an overview for all organizations with pending firmware updates, rather than going through one-by-one.
    • I would like to have some of the switch tools available for firewall devices (port cycling, line testing).
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    • We did have issues during the setup, with successfully connecting to some of our hosts and vCenters and we found support were just sending us back to articles we had already read, it was also taking long periods before getting a response. The issue is still ongoing, in fact.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    Very pleased with he product overall. it is used as expecting + easy to use and very scalable if we want to add new orgs
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    Currently, there is no other tool that gives us what we need to monitor a geographically disperse environment with multiple non-related instances of VM clusters. In addition, the level of reporting, historical data trending, and alerting that VMAN provides is essential for our business process. Lastly, the effort to customize and set up any monitoring system is not trivial. This makes switching to any other product very difficult without being able to clearly demonstrate a ROI.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    Cisco Meraki Dashboard is a modern interface that makes it easy to find devices and their health status. It has powerful remote tools that can help you manage every aspect of the network at a granular level. Something that may be frustrating is that some advanced settings are sometimes oversimplified, and the customization is limited.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Cisco
    Support seems very knowledgeable and provides detail summary about the call. They even follow up later to check on your case.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Its really the best product on the market for someone looking to have total control over their VM environment. anyone interested should download a demo and try it, I know you will buy it after you do. It changing the way you have to manage on a daily basis
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    Cisco Meraki Dashboard is easy to use compared to other vendors. They do not have all the intricate configurations offered by products from competitors, but for the price point and what it gives you there is nothing better. The lower learning curve with onboarding a new hire and get them familiar with Meraki is much easier which our company loves.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    The operation began using Nagios XI, after a year of use, and based on the results obtained, we realized that what our client wanted was not fully met. Our client asked us to use WhatsUp, however, SolarWinds covered in a more efficient way what was required by our client (IT) and even more.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • When there's an issue with communication to the cloud. EX: unable to fetch configs. This due to like new device being installed or if you have to factory reset the device. This has been a negative impact.
    • Incorrect status. Sometimes the status of the device or network is not reflected as it should be. This has had a negative impact in the past. However, for the most part, the Status is fairly accurate.
    • Incident response has been very good. Anytime an issue has been reported to Cisco regarding Cisco Meraki Dashboard, the issue is quickly investigated and doesn't take long to resolve.
    • Customer support and Cisco's technical team has been very helpful and responsive.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    • VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
    • VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
    • VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Cisco Meraki Dashboard Screenshots

    Screenshot of Connect MS225 24portScreenshot of ConnectMS225 24portScreenshot of SECURITY MX64WScreenshot of SECURITY MX64WScreenshot of Connect MS225 24port

    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot