Cloud monitoring for Catalyst wireless is here!

[Nicole_Gardiner]

"It is with deepest pride and greatest pleasure that we welcome you here tonight. Now we invite you to relax, let us pull up a chair", as the product team proudly presents.... CLOUD MONITORING FOR CATALYST WIRELESS! (I hope you're singing Beauty and the Beast all day in your head now. 🤓) 

REAL TALK: We are THRILLED to announce public beta availability of cloud monitoring for Catalyst wireless in the Meraki dashboard! 

BE OUR GUEST, BE OUR GUEST, PUT OUR SERVICE TO THE TEST... with the following hardware:

• C9800 Physical Appliance (C9800-CL to be supported later this year)
• CW91XX, C91XX, 4800, 3800, 2800 AP models

Ready to onboard and see the magic happen? 

Start here: https://documentation.meraki.com/Cloud_Monitoring_for_Catalyst 

Happy dashboarding! 

[PhilipDAth · Accepted solution]

I feel more and more DNAC appliances going idle.  This is a big step forward to offering proper management for medium-sized companies who can't or wont deploy DNAC.

[303nir]

Do heat maps work with catalyst APs?

[Nicole_Gardiner]

Today, location heat maps do not, but Meraki maps and floor plans work.

[Matt_Carroll]

Initial testing looks promising and onboarding was easy enough thanks to great documentation.

A couple major pain points we've noticed so far:

- The limitation of 15 SSIDs per Meraki wireless network is impacting the client visibility. If we have more than 15 SSIDs detected for clients in a single monitored Meraki network, the clients for any additional SSIDs are effectively truncated, so we only get a partial view. This makes the single network for APs and WLC not even an option. We are using the site tag to network mappings instead, but for our campus deployment, one of our larger buildings actually has more than 15 SSIDs active throughout the building (only a subset active in each area), so client data is incomplete.

- The site tag to network mappings work as expected, however it would be nice to have control over these so we can import APs into existing Meraki networks vs only having a new network created per site tag.


I understand that this is still early access and we are testing something still actively being worked on, but just wanted to provide the feedback that these are two major issues that would keep us from ever utilizing cloud monitoring in production and would feel that the first issue with the SSID limitation would be a big oversight if not addressed by GA.

Thank you and the product and development teams for the continued efforts on bringing us additional value and I'm very excited to see where it goes from here.

[Jenn_G]

Hi @Matt_Carroll - We really appreciate the feedback you've sent over and will review.  Could you provide a bit more detail on the site tag ask -  are you looking to use a site tag mapping option when Meraki Dashboard already has networks named using those site tags (ie it's duplicating networks)?

[Matt_Carroll]

Hi Jenn,

The ask would be to remap any discovered site tags to existing Meraki networks, not just to the networks it auto creates.

Example: We have site tags building01 and building02, upon sync of the WLC, if the cloud monitor integration has not seen these site tags before it will create a new networks for each with the naming convention [wlc_network_name]-[site_tag], e.g. campuswlc-building01 and campuswlc-building02

We may already have Meraki networks for these buildings with other devices populated (perhaps containing cameras and switches as an example, things that are not as easily moved as APs) and would like to have the WLC APs synced into those networks instead.

It would be (really) nice to instead have a third option for WLC AP network placement. I see this as where we can learn the site tags from the WLC, but not create new networks automatically, i.e. just have newly discovered APs sit in org inventory upon discovery from WLC. Then admins will need to go to a page under the WLC network which shows all the discovered site tags for the WLC and then can manually choose to either A) map the site tag an existing network from drop down, or B) create a new network on the fly and map the site tag to that, then APs are moved to the target networks.