Two managing partners over one Meraki platform

[AndreasKvist]

Hi, 

I received a question from a partner today.

Situation:

Customer (Hotel) has Meraki based network and partner who manage this network, but customer as well wants some other partner to provide television services in hotel through existing infrastructure (Meraki).

Question: Is it possible to separate network in the way that there are 2 partners managing 2 different nets based on the same Meraki infrastructure and don’t influence each other – can take full responsibilities on their SLAs?

BR

Andreas

[Nash]

No. Meraki equipment can only belong to a single network at a time. It cannot be put into two separate networks.

However, you could grant the TV company access to the applicable networks. Two options:

1) Grant them read-only access and have your managed services provider make changes as requested. This is what my company does for e.g. MSP clients with security cameras. We don't trust third party vendors to make good life choices.

2) Grant the TV company full access to the applicable networks and pray they don't make inappropriate changes.

[BrechtSchamp]

It is possible to a certain degree.

Have a look at this article, it talks about having admins for specific switchports:

https://meraki.cisco.com/blog/2013/12/more-granular-administration-for-cisco-meraki-ms-switches/

This is the more general help page describing all the admin rights stuff:

https://documentation.meraki.com/zGeneral_Administration/Managing_Dashboard_Access/Managing_Dashboar...

Depending on what you want to do this may or may not be enough. If it isn't, the hard way would be to implement a custom front end that leverages the API for one of them... Like I said, that would be a lot of work though.

[Nash]

Ehhhhh, okay. Didn't realize the port-based mgmt was still there. Looks like https://documentation.meraki.com/zGeneral_Administration/Managing_Dashboard_Access/Managing_Dashboar... shows how to do it.

I still don't think I'd trust a third party tho. What changes do they need to make? How often does it need to be done?

[BlakeRichardson]

I would go back to the customer and say its not best practise to have two different companies trying to manage the same hardware, every company has its own way of managing networks.

I would recommend to the customer that you continue to manage the Meraki hardware but work with the other company to make sure they can do their jobm as mentioned already this other company could be setup with read-only access. 

[LandrinLong]

I currently run this way.  I have a read only login to my main ISPs Meraki dashboard to gain some visibility, then I have my own Meraki dashboard to configure our own devices.  Works really well, and when you log into the Meraki website initially, it allows you to choose which dashboard you want to work with.  It's quite slick actually.