Cisco Meraki MS - 6 year Review
November 11, 2024
Cisco Meraki MS - 6 year Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- MS120-8
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki MS
Cisco Meraki MS switches are used in multiple customers of Outcomex. This solution is picked frequently when deploying relatively simple sites across Australia which need basic switching capabilities with a solid dashboard and features. The business problems are generally a new site is being deployed, or a new network, and it requires multiple VLANs with enterprise grade performance for an average of 50-150 end users at any time. There are other possible vendors like Ubiquity who offer similar products, however the centralized nature of the Meraki dashboard is what really sets it apart and makes it easy to use for the administrators (who arent always technically competent)
Pros
- Dashboard - Up/Down ease of checking up/down devices status
- The template config, easy to copy and bulk deploy config to multiple switches. This can be used to fix a bunch of MS switches simultaneously too which is very helpful.
- The integrated features such as Cisco Umbrella and guest WiFi. The customer really appreciated the rapid possibility of getting a site up and running without tinkering through complex configurations.
- Multicast configuration in the L3 settings was very easy to setup and get running. (Snooping Querier)
Cons
- I think it may be fixed now, but for a long time, there was no equivalent of "show version" to see the exact uptime of a switch. This led to questions from upper management sometimes like "when was this device last rebooted?" and there was no way to answer if it had been longer than 3 months.
- Sometimes there are somewhat "generic" errors on the Dashboard when looking at devices (those yellow error messages like DHCP error). If the error messages were a little bit more detailed it could go a long way into troubleshooting issues faster.
- Difficult to quantify, but Cisco Meraki MS is a very stable long term solution which offers a lot of value despite the yearly subscription costs. The stability and features offered offset this because it really helps engineers troubleshooting issues and ensure uptime on the network, which can be very valuable.
We have a NOC and SOC team, when there are new employees starting, Meraki is by far the easiest networking solution to introduce them into. Theres no CLI configuration which greatly helps beginners because they can use a GUI for everything. Even the more senior employees always speak highly of Meraki due to its simple nature.
Having a quick DNS filtering platform integrated into Cisco Meraki MS is super useful to quickly blacklist domains which should not be accessed on a corporate network. Umbrella is also constantly updated with new domains and it just makes life substantially easier in this regard when trying to meet security compliance targets.
Catalyst is good but it requires CLI configuration which can be very complex for beginners because they tend to forget commands. Cisco Meraki MS takes out the complexity by having a GUI, and another advantage is the risk of committing bad configuration is minimized (such as typing a typo in a long command for a vlan or IP address). The GUI's just a lot cleaner to work with.
Do you think Cisco Meraki MS delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Cisco Meraki MS's feature set?
Yes
Did Cisco Meraki MS live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Cisco Meraki MS go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Cisco Meraki MS again?
Yes
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