Cisco Crosswork Network Automation vs. Cisco Meraki Dashboard

Cisco Crosswork Network Automation has been great at reducing the workload our engineers face on the day to day aspects of their jobs. CNC has been able to reduce the time it takes to provision a device while using NSO and has provided valuable data to assist in troubleshooting network wide issues. CNC has been a pivotal aspect to our multi-million dollar network refresh

Incentivized

Cisco Meraki Dashboard is great for NOC teams with little network experience at helping give them all the tools they need to do the job and become more efficient with networks. From easy RMA processes to metric gathering the Cisco Meraki Dashboard does it all very well. The licenses are a problem for a lot of companies since there are no guarantees the product stays online and certain integrations like ThousandEyes are overlooked due to the additional cost despite it being a great product.

Incentivized

• The ability to monitor any port and get accurate information on its activity.
• The ability to port cycle and reboot remotely. This is best for off-hour reboots.
• Being able to search for devices through the client page with an IP address or MAC address saves time on device searches.
• It is an easy process to add and remove devices to different organizations.

Incentivized

• More granular controls over devices. It definitely feels like, especially when you come from a CLI environment and you're working in a command line interface and then going into the dashboard, you can feel restricted sometimes because if they don't have the button you can't press it. So more buttons.

Incentivized

Giving this a 5 as CNC classifies to a specific set of users. CNC is not an 'easy to use' product and thus requires some training to ensure that it can be used to the best of its capabilities. CNC can when used fully provide valuable data that Network Engineers would otherwise have to hunt for on their own.

Incentivized

At the time of writing this, it appears that Cisco Meraki Dashboard has finally integrated a Cisco IOS XE output window into the dashboard. This is a massive step in the right direction and something that it was dearly missing. At the moment, we do not have this integration and so a lot of the times, we have to navigate via several tools menus to get the info we need instead of being able to run a quick command.

Incentivized

A number of networks we've taken over were using Ubiquiti Unifi, which is an okay solution, but a lot more cumbersome to manage. We've found the Cisco Meraki Dashboard system much more intuitive and way less time-intensive. Simple things like setting up dedicated DHCP entries or poking holes in VLAN firewalls are way easier in Cisco Meraki Dashboard.

Incentivized

• When there's an issue with communication to the cloud. EX: unable to fetch configs. This due to like new device being installed or if you have to factory reset the device. This has been a negative impact.
• Incorrect status. Sometimes the status of the device or network is not reflected as it should be. This has had a negative impact in the past. However, for the most part, the Status is fairly accurate.
• Incident response has been very good. Anytime an issue has been reported to Cisco regarding Cisco Meraki Dashboard, the issue is quickly investigated and doesn't take long to resolve.
• Customer support and Cisco's technical team has been very helpful and responsive.

Incentivized