The OP says that they cannot do the "good stuff" with Meraki switches that they could with "normal cisco switches". Well, Meraki leaves out most of the irrelevant stuff too, or is irrelevant for 80-90% of organizations.
Meraki was acquired by Cisco in 2013 as a complimentary product IMO, not a replacement for the legacy Cisco switches. Meraki was meant as a product that was simple to use and to administer from anywhere, for people who don't want to keep a network engineer on staff just to type in IOS commands. These switches are junior level administrator friendly. With these products I can trust a junior PC tech to change a VLAN on a port. If you just want to have a switch to where you can set up some VLANS, some basic L3 routing and VOIP phones, they are pretty good for that, and they perform well, in my case, much better than the switches that they replaced.
I would suggest that the OP didn't do his homework before buying these switches. They are not IOS switches nor were they intended to be. If you need IOS advanced features buy a Catalyst or Nexus switch, simple as that.
If you just need to know when the thing went down, go buy a log aggregator or SIEM and tell the Meraki platform to export syslog to it. That's what we do. You can get actionable information from the syslog output.
Or if you want to make it even simpler, use the new webhook feature. Disclaimer: I haven't personally tried this.