We performed a comparison between Meraki Dashboard and vRealize Network Insight based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Monitoring Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"It is very stable and we have been using it for five years."
"You don't have to be a network engineer to use it."
"I like that Meraki Dashboard is a user-friendly product."
"The ability of the product to perform with simplicity of deployment make it a valuable solution."
"What I love most about the Meraki Dashboard are its user-friendly features."
"The most valuable feature is knowing the wireless and switch are healthy."
"I would say the ease of use is the most valuable feature. It's very easy to set up and get up and running."
"The product can scale if you need it to."
"I like being able to see the flows coming in and out of the product. In terms of monitoring network flows, we use it to verify whether or not different servers/applications should be communicating with each other."
"With this product, we can precisely identify communication patterns between virtual machines within our data center, whether it's east-east or east-west communication."
"I find it user-friendly and intuitive. With the GUI interface that we do use on a regular basis, it's easy to navigate, it's easy to see, easy to query. We get reports. It's easy to use."
"Whenever we say "valuable" with respect to the network, it's more towards the security. The firewall rule issues it shows us and the recommendations that we get from vRNI are the most valuable features because they are actually making our network more secure."
"It helps a lot because, until now, we didn't have the tools to figure out the micro level, VM-to-VM kind of traffic; that was not in the current environment. We could not figure out VM-to-VM communication from the other tools. This is the tool which gives us end-to-end transparency."
"It's a very powerful, very manageable product."
"The most valuable feture is NetFlow to help us understand how VMs communicate with each other over ports that are known and ports that are also unknown to us. Our company is a security company, so it's very important for us to know exactly which VMs are doing what at all times."
"The most valuable feature is the profiling of the applications for micro-segmentation... It has made the migration to NSX much easier. Most of the sys admins within the smaller silos, they have no idea what ports are needed to run their stuff at all. I am pretty sure the micro-segmentation would never, ever have occurred without it."
"The technical support needs improvement."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"For instance, you should be able to see if something has been blocked by a firewall rule by looking at a live log of traffic moving through the device. It helps you troubleshoot issues and understand if your rules are working. You need to ensure the firewall is blocking the right things. That's unavailable in the Meraki Dashboard. You have to send the logs to a log server. We use SolarWinds locally, but it's not natively built into Meraki. We're also using Cisco ISA and another tool called Smoothwall."
"More integration would be an improvement."
"The pricing for this solution needs to be improved."
"There are some issues with the NAT configuration, it is now impossible to some operations with the solution."
"For my purposes, I don't need to see any other features added to the Meraki Dashboard. I have no criticisms and I do like the tool. If I had a criticism for it, it would be about the pricing because it could be a little less, but again, for the service that you get, I won't complain about that too much."
"The initial setup is complex and can be made more straightforward."
"The tool needs to incorporate more integration platforms. Integrating technical support features directly into the dashboard would be highly beneficial. This would allow technicians to troubleshoot issues more efficiently."
"Meraki lacks their own software for connecting to the VPN which creates some issues."
"When we talk about those micro-segmentation rules, there's an Export function. It is very macro-segmentation oriented instead. So if you choose an application, it will find the tiers within that application and say that it's communicating on, say, port 80 to a separate VLAN. There might be 200 machines in that other VLAN. You don't want to open port 80 at all of them. So we need a lot more granularity in those suggested firewall rules."
"If it had some kind of plugins with vSphere, more effective plugins with Horizon View or other VMWare products, if it had interconnectivity, I think it would be more effective than it is today."
"I would like to see more reporting features, more dashboards."
"There is room for improvement when it comes to pricing because we pay here in Brazil, and all the costs are based on the dollar."
"I want to be able to monitor a network flow that is approximately two weeks back, but I haven't found an easy way to do this."
"It needs to be a little easier to use and to understand the information it's putting out. That would make it more helpful. If you're not a network person you need to understand things like network policies and concepts. If you gave it to a regular admin, it would be nice if it were easier for them to pick up what is going on, understand the flows and whether or not stuff should be talking to each other, as opposed to just port groups and IP addresses."
"The only issue we have is that the solution does not always capture the host names."
"In a very general way, I would like to see an improvement in interoperability with third-party product, from other vendors."
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Meraki Dashboard is ranked 9th in Network Monitoring Software with 51 reviews while vRealize Network Insight is ranked 22nd in Network Monitoring Software with 44 reviews. Meraki Dashboard is rated 8.6, while vRealize Network Insight is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Meraki Dashboard writes "Incredibly easy to use, great troubleshooting and prevention of malicious events". On the other hand, the top reviewer of vRealize Network Insight writes "Provides deep analytical insights and makes migrations efficient with dependency mapping". Meraki Dashboard is most compared with Cisco DNA Center, SolarWinds NPM, ThousandEyes, Mist AI and Cloud and Zabbix, whereas vRealize Network Insight is most compared with ThousandEyes, NETSCOUT vSTREAM, AppNeta by Broadcom, Zabbix and SolarWinds NPM. See our Meraki Dashboard vs. vRealize Network Insight report.
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