Cisco Meraki Dashboard vs. IBM Netcool Network Management

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

This tool was integrated with Control-M, so whenever we receive any job failure, long-running job, job not started yet, etc, we receive an alert against it. This tool is also integrated with Maximo where we receive the incidents as well for it. Alert's color was as per the criticality of the job and that makes it very easy for an associate to act on it to resolve. We have the SLAs for the jobs as per the urgency of the jobs.

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

• This is one of the best monitoring tools.
• Very simple to user.
• Color code makes it very simple as per severity.
• We receive the heartbeat alert every hour that shows the system is running up and fine.
• We have black, red, yellow, and orange color alerts that show the critical, urgent, major, and minor incidents.

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

• Sometimes color differences of the incidents as per the criticality .
• We don't receive the heartbeat alerts sometimes.
• If the tool is down and we don't receive the alerts on the console we wait for the heartbeat alert and it makes some extra delay in resolving things.

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

This is one of the essential tools for monitoring. This tool was integrated with Maximo and Control-M in my organization. So whenever any job failed in Control-M, we receive an alert against it in the IBM Netcool/OMNIbus. We receive the alerts in different colors as per the criticality. Black for critical ones(Sev1), red for urgent (Sev2), yellow for major(Sev3), and orange for minor(Sev4). So it makes an easy to operate and act on the alerts as per the severity. This tool is very user-friendly and easy to use. No additional training is required for the tool to operate, just a simple KT is enough.

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

• Color feature of the alerts as per the criticality is the amazing feature.
• Heartbeat alert is also an unique feature.
• No additional training is required to use this tool. just a simple KT is enough.

Incentivized