Meraki Device Naming Convention/Standards

[NJNetworkGuy100]

We are looking into standardizing our device names (MS, MR, MX, switch stacks) across our global orgs....

Asking for any advice or examples folks can give me....

Each Meraki network is a physical location....outside of NA, we might have networks in multiple cities in a country, and in NA, we might have networks in multiple cities in a state (sometimes multiple offices in a single large city).  

I'm thinking we should be descriptive in naming each device, for readability purposes when looking for a device in drop-downs or reports in the Dashboard and for networks with a large number of devices.  

How do you all name your devices?  And how do you use Device Tags and the Device Notes field to add additional info that isn't in the name of the device?  

What do you all think?  Examples and any advice would be very helpful. 

[alemabrahao]

We use hostname convention in our enterprise:

AAABBCC-NN

where AAA is the first 3 letters of the city or location

BB is the state

CC is the first 2 digits of the platform/model

NN is the order of the device

for example FLNSCMS-01

FLN - Florianopolis

SC - Santa Catarina

MS - Maraki switch

01 is the first device on that location or LAN

The Tags you can use to identify the location too.

[BlakeRichardson]

Location / Building / Cabinet / Item number is what I normally use. 

It's important to physically label the devices as well. 

[cmr]

We used to use CCSSDDN where:

CC = Country

SS = Site / City

DD = Device Type

N = Number

So UKBNES1 would be the first Ethernet Switch in Brighton, United Kingdom.

However for Meraki we now are purely descriptive relative to the site as each site has it's own network and Meraki differentiates the devices, i.e. Basement outside toilets could be the description of an Access Point.

[NJNetworkGuy100]

We are looking at different naming styles, and, like you, we are thinking of moving away from the names with "two digit codes" buried in them, that only make sense if you know what you are looking at. 

We are also looking at making the device names much more readable and descriptive.  It isn't like there is a real limit on the length of the name, and we are looking at where we'd use the names and who would need to read the names of the devices.  I'm thinking of all the various email alerts and dashboard pages that show the description of the device (wireless health reports, client connection pages, drop-down menus, etc...).

[alemabrahao]

The standalone combined network name is limited to 38 characters for the combined network due to the network type suffix (MX, MS, MR) getting appended to the name without visibility. The validation limitation is 50 characters.

I remember that in the past I had problems with devices Meraki to update the config on the dashboard because they had a very large name configured. So just be careful not to cause any kind of problem for you.