Cisco Meraki Insight is a network analytics tool that supports troubleshooting, and helps IT administrators optimize the end user experience, so as to significantly reduce the time it takes to isolate network or application problems.
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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Score 8.3 out of 10
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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is network diagnostics and troubleshooting technology, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
We found that Cisco Meraki is well suited to our education environment. Utilized across a central network (although it could easily be cloud-connected), we use this system to monitor (in real-time) network events. Our Wi-Fi network is a good example; we can easily issue guest Wi-Fi codes and even delegate access to code generation to our reception teams so that they can issue them to guests.
There was a need to find an old configuration of a network switch that was accidentally wiped clean. Fortunately, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) kept and archived a backup copy of the switch device in question! We were easily able to upload the configuration file to the switch and restore the device back on the network in a matter of minutes!
Securing appliances with the ability to automatically update firmware or schedule at our convenience.
Support Teams, we cannot emphasize enough the outstanding support Cisco Meraki provides and they are always willing to go the extra mile to ensure everything is working well.
Warranty of products, if ever there is a question on physical equipment Cisco Meraki replaces it quickly no questions asked.
For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline.
Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.
The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.
To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.
Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it
Cisco Meraki has made the world of management so much easier, allowing IT Administrators and Business Management personnel to enjoy more time on the business needs and less time managing equipment.
At the time SolarWinds was the biggest player in the space and their whole portfolio was very comprehensive. As time progressed and newer technologies came about (i.e. SDWAN) their products couldn't keep up with the consumer demands and changing market. Security became such a big focus that once Solarwinds got hacked we had to remove all their products from our environment
Just about every department we've been asked to provide access to has been able to utilize this system. Be it from a CCTV perspective or for environment reporting, Cisco Meraki Insight can fit into this situation with ease, and without a great deal of training, our users found the system very intuitive.
Saves 100s of hours a year in man hours over manual configuration.
Saved easily 50k in lost revenue when a switch rebooted with months old unsaved configuration. NCM let us quickly restore a snapshot of the running config from the previous day.
Saves us several man hours per week of config auditing by reducing all changes to a summary email.
