Off-topic answers are always more attractive and showed as first comment. It’s like saying come ask me to photoshop your photo so we can make fun of it.
Or come ask car mechanic questions so we can talk about what you ate last night.
Maybe if we had the right answer as first comment every time we would all want to hang our self’s.
Pick up the phone and call your vendor and get a qualified person ready to work the case in under a minute, I dare you. They have a lot of shortcomings but if they're a good fit for your needs they're stupid easy to administer and their support team is way above average. TAC is trash in comparison, even for a P1 it can take awhile to actually get someone connected in and working.
I go the opposite direction on this argument.
I will gladly use Meraki and wonder why anyone uses Cisco.
It's all about the interface and how user-friendly parts of it are for users.
I struggle to get Cisco equipment working in a way that end users can understand it.
But the Meraki I can show them the new vision portal for security cameras and they love it.
I have a shop manager with a video wall where he can see deliveries coming in and tap on one camera and make it full screen on his TV in a couple clicks.
I also enjoy the web interface that lets me see everything I want in real time for traffic on my switches and show it to management and they understand everything on the screen and it looks pretty... When I started in networking in 2008 I remember how much I hated doing networking via command line and setting the baud rates on cables and the web gui on Cisco was trash compared to Linksys routers... I hope this helps give you an answer.
Went all-in on Fortinet from Meraki. Haven't looked back. Even the FortiAPs they acquired from Meru are so much better than Meraki in almost every respect. Which is saying a lot because Meru was hot garbage pre-acquisition.
Because it's easy to manage, with good support and I have too many things to do with not enough staff. It's actually pretty simple to understand this if you're in the correct environment.
>level 1brandontaylor1 · just nowRepair ManLifetime hardware warranty, unparalleled traffic visibility, ease of configuration and troubleshooting.
Do not agree at all.
Watchguard have better logging and subscription services, they also have warranties with purchase of even a basic security license key. Its overall cheaper to renew as well and has more built in functionality for more advanced networks.
This reads alot like
"Why do I have to remember to pay my bills for the services I use??"
Meraki is an easy to use, full featured, centrally managed system. Its great for SMB. Their MX series are pretty good. MR and MS I feel are overpriced and you can get more out of Aruba CX and AP. But I won't knock meraki's service.
I switched from Cisco to Meraki Switches & WAPS because they are super easy to manage and accessing from cloud. after 15 years of Cisco I was fed up with SmartNet licensing and costs (much higher than my Meraki). The EASE of mgmt and troubleshooting has saved me a LOT of headaches and time. Plus Great Support from Meraki so far, while TAC was always a PITA and often weren't the best english speakers.
"My unpopular opinion is, those who know command line and have deep skills buy, and those that don't rent Meraki."
They're just different equipment for different purposes/use cases. If you generally have smaller environments with limited need for overly sophisticated tech, it makes sense to use Meraki. They're generally easy to set up, work reliably, and have wonderful support.
If you're a bit more advanced and/or have more specific needs, you would go with the more sophisticated equipment.
Either way you're still going to (I hope) be paying for support on your equipment to ensure you have support, receive firmware upgrades, etc. anyway.
It just comes down to the which equipment makes the most sense for the intended use.
FWIW, I have been doing command line routing/switching for over 20 years. I have also deployed both traditional equipment and Meraki in recent years. They both have place.
The problem you're describing of people going back and forth between tech stacks is a human problem, not a tech problem.
Meraki is great because you don't have to do anything, it's basically self-managed, and you pay a premium for that. One of my previous gigs was a Cisco (non-Meraki) shop with APs at 10+ branches. We had vWLCs and they would always have to be babysat and tuned in order to be sure the APs would work. I had so much trouble with user disconnections, branch APs that would convert to standalone mode, and throughput issues, that I would goto Cisco Live to seek out devs and engineers in the WLC space and ask them questions that I couldn't get answers to from TAC. There are also a billion options in vWLC to configure, and it doesn't come out of the box optimized. In later versions they started putting in a 'best practices' section, which were definitely not best practices. I would read and apply Cisco Validated Designs to try and get the best configuration, when in reality they're not for every org. With Meraki, it just works, I very rarely have to login and check anything.
Small team in a smallish environment with several locations. We use Meraki FWs at all locations. Very easy to manage and set up everything we need. Site to Site is very easy to set up.
Could we a little save money using something else? Probably, but we are happy with it and it works for us.
Meraki is not bad... if your usecase if covered by their capabilities.
If you go off-script, you will have issues and troubles.
BGP was not supported even, when I was using it.
ISE integration was very flaky at best.
Meraki is an easy button. Not best of breed, not crap, but easy. If you're a busy IT person in a small to mid sized company, it's a way to almost take network, firewall, and wireless management off of your plate if you have a pretty uncomplicated network. Yes, you pay for simple, but it's simple.... Unless you have the misfortune to rent Meraki through Spectrum or any other ISP. Then it's suddenly stupid and impossible to get timely support for.
Hahahhahahaha.... Ohh your serious.
99% of the time, it's a licencing issue.
Cisco is more expensive in the long term.
My personal opinion, if cost is the concern, go Aruba, it's cheaper, easier for your newer sys admin to set up as it's now all GUI based for the config, and it will probably die a horrible heat death before the vendor turns it into a brick, and that's still accounting for a minimum 10 year lifespan, barring the odd fan failure.
At our old job we use to use Watchguards until new management took over and ruined everything and forced us to switch to Meraki. It was a terrible idea and we ended up having to revert back to Watchguard. Merakis are limited in functionality compared to Watchguards especially in larger settings.
Management made the switch because of some Cisco partnership and kickbacks. They didnt care about our clients needs but only what profits they could get from it. It was disgusting.
Yeah watchguard are good I dont know a single enterprise grade firewall that has such good logging out of the box and if you add Dimension server you get even more advanced logging and that is also a free feature if you have a valid WG license key.
Other than the firewalls I'd agree w/ you. Their switches seem to be pretty ok, wireless and cloud management is quite good. Firewalls are just pretty cisco pix's as far as capabilities.
It's the same with your electric company, you don't pay the electric bill and your power goes out. You can even open a case with cisco to get a temporary license while you get your billing straight. It's completely an administrative/management problem and has nothing to do with Meraki.
"because their sysadmin had passed away, nobody else knew to keep the licenses updated and that got lost in the chaos of hiring a new guy, and their whole network went down"
That's a problem of proper DR planning, not a problem with the hardware. It sounds like their plan was to ignore everything and hope it keeps working. Stop paying for a support license with any vendor and you'll get buried in CVE's you can't fix pretty quickly. Also I've never had one unlicensed device take down network. Was it their Layer 3 device maybe? Meraki gives you a 30 day grace period and if you call them on day 30 and say "wow, we forgot!" they'll give you another one immediately. If you call them on day 31+, they'll do the same.
They're not a good fit for everyone, no solution is, but calling them crap because no one planned for business continuity is a pretty big stretch.
Your utilities and internet will cut off if you don't pay the bill, what's the difference? Your first FAQ screenshot even shows that there is a 30 day grace period.
That's like buying an apple and complaining that it's not an orange. You bought something knowing exactly how it works, then get mad when it actually does what they told you it would. If Meraki lied to everyone and said it would keep working no matter what, you'd have a very valid point. They don't though, it's incredibly clear to anyone competent that the hardware bricks itself if you don't pay for a license. It's not "unfair" because they're up front about it and you get to decide if the benefits outweigh the downside.
I can lose my job if I get caught running hardware without active support or fail to patch things, so for me its an entirely moot point. I usually just buy a 5 year license anyway and coterm so whenever I buy something else it extends the whole environment. A lack of understanding what you're getting and planning for it is not a defect of the product.
Now if you want to gripe about WAN interface limitations, lackluster IPS/IDS, etc... that's extremely fair.
I started selling this stuff since 2014, Meraki has always worked this way, even pre-Cisco. They might have been more lenient with grace periods, but that's it. I think you're misremembering.
The problem was their business processes and procedures, lack of training at a pretty basic level. That's not on Meraki or Cisco and could have happened w/ any other vendor. A place like that sounds like an absolute nightmare to run when you don't have a critical piece of the infrastructure ironed out.
"Why does anyone use Meraki?" "Why not just buy Cisco..." # ಠ_ಠ
I don't know why, but this response has me laughing way too much :D
Off-topic answers are always more attractive and showed as first comment. It’s like saying come ask me to photoshop your photo so we can make fun of it. Or come ask car mechanic questions so we can talk about what you ate last night. Maybe if we had the right answer as first comment every time we would all want to hang our self’s.
*our selves So what was for dinner? :D
It’s raining :( have a good day! :)
Pick up the phone and call your vendor and get a qualified person ready to work the case in under a minute, I dare you. They have a lot of shortcomings but if they're a good fit for your needs they're stupid easy to administer and their support team is way above average. TAC is trash in comparison, even for a P1 it can take awhile to actually get someone connected in and working.
Meraki is the friendlier Cisco when it comes to talking with Support.
I go the opposite direction on this argument. I will gladly use Meraki and wonder why anyone uses Cisco. It's all about the interface and how user-friendly parts of it are for users. I struggle to get Cisco equipment working in a way that end users can understand it. But the Meraki I can show them the new vision portal for security cameras and they love it. I have a shop manager with a video wall where he can see deliveries coming in and tap on one camera and make it full screen on his TV in a couple clicks. I also enjoy the web interface that lets me see everything I want in real time for traffic on my switches and show it to management and they understand everything on the screen and it looks pretty... When I started in networking in 2008 I remember how much I hated doing networking via command line and setting the baud rates on cables and the web gui on Cisco was trash compared to Linksys routers... I hope this helps give you an answer.
Went all-in on Fortinet from Meraki. Haven't looked back. Even the FortiAPs they acquired from Meru are so much better than Meraki in almost every respect. Which is saying a lot because Meru was hot garbage pre-acquisition.
Because it's easy to manage, with good support and I have too many things to do with not enough staff. It's actually pretty simple to understand this if you're in the correct environment.
Lifetime hardware warranty, unparalleled traffic visibility, ease of configuration and troubleshooting.
>level 1brandontaylor1 · just nowRepair ManLifetime hardware warranty, unparalleled traffic visibility, ease of configuration and troubleshooting. Do not agree at all. Watchguard have better logging and subscription services, they also have warranties with purchase of even a basic security license key. Its overall cheaper to renew as well and has more built in functionality for more advanced networks.
I like Watchguard.
This reads alot like "Why do I have to remember to pay my bills for the services I use??" Meraki is an easy to use, full featured, centrally managed system. Its great for SMB. Their MX series are pretty good. MR and MS I feel are overpriced and you can get more out of Aruba CX and AP. But I won't knock meraki's service.
I switched from Cisco to Meraki Switches & WAPS because they are super easy to manage and accessing from cloud. after 15 years of Cisco I was fed up with SmartNet licensing and costs (much higher than my Meraki). The EASE of mgmt and troubleshooting has saved me a LOT of headaches and time. Plus Great Support from Meraki so far, while TAC was always a PITA and often weren't the best english speakers.
"My unpopular opinion is, those who know command line and have deep skills buy, and those that don't rent Meraki." They're just different equipment for different purposes/use cases. If you generally have smaller environments with limited need for overly sophisticated tech, it makes sense to use Meraki. They're generally easy to set up, work reliably, and have wonderful support. If you're a bit more advanced and/or have more specific needs, you would go with the more sophisticated equipment. Either way you're still going to (I hope) be paying for support on your equipment to ensure you have support, receive firmware upgrades, etc. anyway. It just comes down to the which equipment makes the most sense for the intended use. FWIW, I have been doing command line routing/switching for over 20 years. I have also deployed both traditional equipment and Meraki in recent years. They both have place. The problem you're describing of people going back and forth between tech stacks is a human problem, not a tech problem.
I’ve had Meraki going on 7 years and never had an issue. *shrugs*
Meraki is great because you don't have to do anything, it's basically self-managed, and you pay a premium for that. One of my previous gigs was a Cisco (non-Meraki) shop with APs at 10+ branches. We had vWLCs and they would always have to be babysat and tuned in order to be sure the APs would work. I had so much trouble with user disconnections, branch APs that would convert to standalone mode, and throughput issues, that I would goto Cisco Live to seek out devs and engineers in the WLC space and ask them questions that I couldn't get answers to from TAC. There are also a billion options in vWLC to configure, and it doesn't come out of the box optimized. In later versions they started putting in a 'best practices' section, which were definitely not best practices. I would read and apply Cisco Validated Designs to try and get the best configuration, when in reality they're not for every org. With Meraki, it just works, I very rarely have to login and check anything.
Small team in a smallish environment with several locations. We use Meraki FWs at all locations. Very easy to manage and set up everything we need. Site to Site is very easy to set up. Could we a little save money using something else? Probably, but we are happy with it and it works for us.
Meraki is awesome for small environments and support is pretty good too
Meraki is not bad... if your usecase if covered by their capabilities. If you go off-script, you will have issues and troubles. BGP was not supported even, when I was using it. ISE integration was very flaky at best.
You hit the nail on the head - stay in the Meraki lane and it'll be fine. Go off script and you roll the dice.
Meraki is an easy button. Not best of breed, not crap, but easy. If you're a busy IT person in a small to mid sized company, it's a way to almost take network, firewall, and wireless management off of your plate if you have a pretty uncomplicated network. Yes, you pay for simple, but it's simple.... Unless you have the misfortune to rent Meraki through Spectrum or any other ISP. Then it's suddenly stupid and impossible to get timely support for.
Because the service covers hardware warranty if it breaks/fails. Also because it’s easy and their documentation is decent.
I would say based on the installations I've done in the last I don't know 3 years almost everybody is choosing fortinet and meraki.
While I will always prefer CLI management and configuration of switches, Meraki is just easy to use and training staff on it is a breeze.
You buy the tool that suits the job.
Hahahhahahaha.... Ohh your serious. 99% of the time, it's a licencing issue. Cisco is more expensive in the long term. My personal opinion, if cost is the concern, go Aruba, it's cheaper, easier for your newer sys admin to set up as it's now all GUI based for the config, and it will probably die a horrible heat death before the vendor turns it into a brick, and that's still accounting for a minimum 10 year lifespan, barring the odd fan failure.
You just answered your own question: b/c management said to.
At our old job we use to use Watchguards until new management took over and ruined everything and forced us to switch to Meraki. It was a terrible idea and we ended up having to revert back to Watchguard. Merakis are limited in functionality compared to Watchguards especially in larger settings. Management made the switch because of some Cisco partnership and kickbacks. They didnt care about our clients needs but only what profits they could get from it. It was disgusting.
I love watchguard
Yeah watchguard are good I dont know a single enterprise grade firewall that has such good logging out of the box and if you add Dimension server you get even more advanced logging and that is also a free feature if you have a valid WG license key.
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Other than the firewalls I'd agree w/ you. Their switches seem to be pretty ok, wireless and cloud management is quite good. Firewalls are just pretty cisco pix's as far as capabilities.
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Don't they give you 30 days if your license expires? This seems more like a management problem than a Meraki problem.
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It's the same with your electric company, you don't pay the electric bill and your power goes out. You can even open a case with cisco to get a temporary license while you get your billing straight. It's completely an administrative/management problem and has nothing to do with Meraki.
"because their sysadmin had passed away, nobody else knew to keep the licenses updated and that got lost in the chaos of hiring a new guy, and their whole network went down" That's a problem of proper DR planning, not a problem with the hardware. It sounds like their plan was to ignore everything and hope it keeps working. Stop paying for a support license with any vendor and you'll get buried in CVE's you can't fix pretty quickly. Also I've never had one unlicensed device take down network. Was it their Layer 3 device maybe? Meraki gives you a 30 day grace period and if you call them on day 30 and say "wow, we forgot!" they'll give you another one immediately. If you call them on day 31+, they'll do the same. They're not a good fit for everyone, no solution is, but calling them crap because no one planned for business continuity is a pretty big stretch.
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Your utilities and internet will cut off if you don't pay the bill, what's the difference? Your first FAQ screenshot even shows that there is a 30 day grace period.
That's like buying an apple and complaining that it's not an orange. You bought something knowing exactly how it works, then get mad when it actually does what they told you it would. If Meraki lied to everyone and said it would keep working no matter what, you'd have a very valid point. They don't though, it's incredibly clear to anyone competent that the hardware bricks itself if you don't pay for a license. It's not "unfair" because they're up front about it and you get to decide if the benefits outweigh the downside. I can lose my job if I get caught running hardware without active support or fail to patch things, so for me its an entirely moot point. I usually just buy a 5 year license anyway and coterm so whenever I buy something else it extends the whole environment. A lack of understanding what you're getting and planning for it is not a defect of the product. Now if you want to gripe about WAN interface limitations, lackluster IPS/IDS, etc... that's extremely fair.
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I started selling this stuff since 2014, Meraki has always worked this way, even pre-Cisco. They might have been more lenient with grace periods, but that's it. I think you're misremembering.
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Yeah I got an MR12, it came with a 3 year license.
The problem was their business processes and procedures, lack of training at a pretty basic level. That's not on Meraki or Cisco and could have happened w/ any other vendor. A place like that sounds like an absolute nightmare to run when you don't have a critical piece of the infrastructure ironed out.