Operational Best Practices for Service Providers
When creating new networks and organizations as an MSP, there are some best practices that increase the ease of management and prevent scalability problems as the service grows.
- When creating multiple Organizations:
- Create a unique name for each Organization to avoid confusion.
- Licenses, user accounts, and site-to-site VPN, and device inventory are organization-wide. Because of this, deploy a separate Organization for each budgetary group/company.
- When creating the Organization an email is required. This email is used as the administrative login for the Dashboard account. Therefore it should not be a personal email. This will allow recovery of the account if there is a change in personnel.
- Clone new customer organizations from an existing organization to preserve SP specific features
- Some settings, such as branding or EoGRE, must be enabled by Support. Cloning from an organization that already has these features will prevent an extra call to Support as the SP specific features are retained during the cloning process.
- Please see the linked article for information on what settings are carried over during the cloning process
- Create networks and organizations using a generic shared address, such as meraki@example.com
- Multiple admins can easily access and share this account
- As admins change, the account remains the same. The account can be tied to a mailer list to ensure that, in the event of an alert or licensing issue, multiple parties are notified
- Additional admins can still be added with their own e-mails, after creation is done using the generic account
- Create separate organizations for each customer/company, since each organization will share the following across its networks/devices:
- Use SAML with the Cisco Meraki Dashboard to provide external authentication of users and a means of SSO (Single Sign-On)
I am not a Cisco Meraki employee. My suggestions are based on documentation of Meraki best practices and day-to-day experience.
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