End users - the thorn in an engineer's side. The Meraki dashboard is a (hmmm.. what adjective do I use because there are so many) comprehensive troubleshooting tool. Yes, the cloud management aspect means you don't have to do on-site. However, if you were on-site, what's the most useful troubleshooting tool? CLI? *yawn* What's that tell you? MAC addresses in use? VLAN/port configurations? How helpful is that? I'll tell you - not very. How much bandwidth is a user taking? How long has it been since a device was online? Without external monitoring via SNMP of netflow, you can't find this info. Have you ever had to justify an expensive out of town trip only to find out you are no closer to finding the root cause of your network issues? Here are 2 ways the Meraki dashboard has helped me - and it can help you too. 1 - Cable port testing We've all seen this before right? (I took this picture at the last customer site I visited...) Have you ever had to test one of these? 19 WAPs mounted in the ceiling of a warehouse. Customer claimed we had a bad switch port since 2 WAPs provided poor Internet access. But we tested all the WAPs and all worked correctly. What changed? Oh wait, customer provided the cable vendor. Login to dasahboard, click on the switch, select the port, then scroll to the bottom. Ran a cable test & found the cable run was over 350feet. Hmmm... sounds like that's over the 100meter max to me. "Mr customer - I think you need a new (shorter) cable! May I recommend a low-voltage contractor that DOEs respect ethernet standards?" 2 - Client bandwidth usage We had a client that upgraded from 10meg to 100 meg Internet. At first, things were fast. The client then reported backups were failing due to transfers timing out. Pop in the dashboard and check the client graph. - Looks like an issue to me. Click on the Usage column to sort then click on the top client. From there, click show details on the application graph. BAM! We found the culprit. Bittorrent traffic from 8p-4a was saturating the circuit. This is where computer names are helpful. We made a call to the client with the affected PC name & were told they would take care of it. We asked about the owner of that PC so we could update our notes. "We'll take care of the user - rest assured there will be no more BT traffic from that PC." Again we asked who's PC it was... after a brief silence, our suspicions were confirmed. "It was the IT Director's PC." The dashboard is not only convenient but a very helpful troubleshooting tool.
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