Assign Meraki licenses to sites

Achievement1st
Conversationalist

Assign Meraki licenses to sites

Is there a way to assign the licenses that are purchased for Meraki cameras to specific sites (i.e. if 1 site buys 3 cameras in October and then another site adds 4 cameras in January, I would like to make sure when renewal time comes - each site only pays for the cameras they purchased).

7 REPLIES 7
kYutobi
Kind of a big deal

The license is active as soon as purchase for them is made. The only way you'd be able to do it is if they are under different accounts. 1Site-1 account / 2Site-1 account. Licenses will be bundled together when applied if they went under same account. 

Enthusiast

I understand that - but ideally you would be able to say that these set of licenses apply to this site and these set of licenses apply to this site (under the same account). This primarily a feature request - but it would be beneficial for multi-site environment accounts. 

I agree if you put it that way. Would be nice but Meraki likes to keep it simple by rallying everything together so you don't have to remember that for example: one license will expire this Xday and then the other 3 months from now.

Enthusiast

Ok - but in an environment where you can have multiple 'sites' under one account, it would be useful to have the option. Even if it were something as simple as writing a note saying that the cameras purchased with this license belong to site X. So that when it comes time to renew the licenses, you don't have to remember which site originally had 3 and which site originally had 4, etc. 

The automatic co-termination has pros and cons indeed, this is one of them. I know Meraki are working on this but I don't know what the status of that is.

 

At renewal I'd just fetch an export from the inventory and create a pivot table based on the "Network" column in the inventory. That way you know exactly what number of devices is in which site (Network) and split up the renewal invoice that way.

 

The only issue with this is on the initial purchase of new equipment and their licenses:

Imagine site A bought 3 camera's with 3 year licenses, and 2 years later site B buys 1 camera with a 3 year license. Due to automatic co-termination, for site B the renewal would actually come earlier than the 3 years they purchased, because part of the value of their license will be "transferred" over to the site A camera's. That's the nature of the co-termination, but it's not fair to the site B guys.

 

The mathematical system of the automatic co-termination is pretty transparent though, so I guess you (or the bookies, they love this stuff) could work out the maths yourself to discount them for the first renewal.

I don't want co-termination. I just want an easy place to put information like "these 3 licenses were bought for Site A on 11/19/13"  and "these 4 licenses were bought for site B on 12/16/15" without having to create something outside of the system. Because when there's a licensing issue - if I'm not still around - the person will go to the system and not to a pivot table. Also, being able to add a note puts it in line with where all the other relevant information is located.

 

Is this community board the only place to make a feature request like this?

I think reaching out to your Meraki rep and also sending in a make-a-wish are to things you should do as well.

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