Cisco Meraki Insight vs. Grafana

Within healthcare, services, or manufacturing organizations the Cisco Meraki systems have performed remarkably well. The security standpoint of Cisco aligned equipment needs no additional mentioning other than they are the top choice for Federal, State, and Local governments as well as a plethora of organizations from different market areas.

Incentivized

If I was starting over on an Observability platform, Grafana would be my number 1 choice due to the flexibility and ability to act as a single platform either on its own or combining multiple data sources. The trick however, is that it can be fairly complex to learn and setup, so time is needed to make it a successful implementation. There is a level of cognitive load required

Incentivized

• Configuration options.
• Easy to use Dashboard.
• Reporting

Incentivized

• Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
• Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
• Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
• Microservices monitoring
• Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere

Incentivized

• Expensive maintenance fee.
• Expensive equipment.

Incentivized

• There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
• We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
• In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.

It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources

Incentivized

Cisco Meraki has made the world of management so much easier, allowing IT Administrators and Business Management personnel to enjoy more time on the business needs and less time managing equipment.

Incentivized

Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.

Incentivized

Just about every department we've been asked to provide access to has been able to utilize this system. Be it from a CCTV perspective or for environment reporting, Cisco Meraki Insight can fit into this situation with ease, and without a great deal of training, our users found the system very intuitive.

Incentivized

• The ease of use saved us many hours of billable time.
• Support added lots of value.
• Licensing and equipment cost really put a damper on overall value (being so high).

Incentivized

• Time-consuming reports reduced
• Spotting trends in services
• Preventive maintenance

Incentivized