We compared Centreon and Meraki Dashboard across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Centreon features a user-friendly interface with useful options for customization and manual configuration. Users like the solution’s flexible dashboards and the ability to create plugins. Meraki Dashboard users like its centralized console, cable testing, firmware updates, and group policy features. The solution is also praised as user-friendly, stable, and scalable.
Room for Improvement: Some Centreon users requested better documentation and more flexibility to customize reporting. Other areas for improvement include auto-scanning efficiency and integration. Users say Meraki Dashboard could improve its client VPN, hardware discovery, and integration with external solutions, Some users mentioned a need for more comprehensive documentation and granular control.
Service and Support: Centreon is highly regarded for its prompt and knowledgeable customer service that offers support in multiple languages. However, some customers feel that the lower levels of support are inadequate. Meraki Dashboard's customer service receives mixed feedback. Some users spoke fondly of the technical support they received, while others expressed frustration over long wait times and had a hard time finding the right person to help them.
Ease of Deployment: Centreon's initial setup is described as time-consuming and complex. The deployment varies in duration depending on the IT infrastructure. Users said Meraki Dashboard was effortless and intuitive to set up, noting that features like templates and configuration cloning saved time during deployment.
Pricing: Centreon's cost depends on the company's size. It is affordable and suitable for small companies, but it can be costly to scale up. Opinions on Meraki Dashboard's pricing varied, with some users finding it pricey and others deeming it fair.
ROI: Centreon delivers value by helping users identify and resolve critical issues fasters, which could yield large savings. Meraki Dashboard simplifies IT operations, and some users expect returns within a few years.
Comparison Results: Centreon is a flexible solution offering a range of customization options. The solution has earned high marks for support and affordability. At the same time, users say the setup can be complicated and time-consuming. Others said that auto-scanning and integration have room for improvement. Meraki Dashboard is a scalable, user-friendly solution with a smooth, painless setup made easy by built-in templates and features like configuration cloning. However, some users complained that the solution is too expensive and needs better integration with non-Cisco platforms.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs."
"Another feature we use is Business Activity, which provides us with an end-user perspective when a service is down or isn't working correctly. This is helpful when monitoring the KPIs. When we see a device or server that isn't working, we find the root cause."
"I really like the filtering capabilities of it. You can easily tell what's critical next to what's okay, the state of the services. It's very easy to get the whole picture quickly."
"We have all our tickets inside Centreon in real-time and can monitor a lot of ELP and CLN in real-time for application purposes."
"The most important feature is that it permits us to receive alarms if there is an incident within the infrastructure. The feature I love the most is the reporting feature, the MBI (Monitoring Business Intelligence) which permits us to send advanced reports to our customers in PDF format or in Doc format. We also deploy Centreon Map which gives our customers intuitive views of their information system."
"The downtimes feature is helpful. If the ISP is doing some maintenance on its network, we have the option to put downtime on the devices or the services, so we won't get any false alarms."
"You can concentrate and orchestrate several other solutions from other vendors. You can consolidate those solutions all in one place, then maintain and monitor from that single point. This creates ease of use. It is a very powerful solution from this point of view."
"We are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention."
"Meraki Dashboard centralizes control of all our equipment into one cloud-based console, so we can manage it from anywhere. We can resolve problems remotely outside of business hours because it is on the cloud. You can use the dashboard to change security settings or configure routers and switches."
"It's really user-friendly."
"Everything is in a single pane and you can look at your network in one centralized place."
"It can analyze the traffic that it is picking up from what may be a rogue access point, and it is able to identify those and send relevant notifications."
"It's a simple, functional solution."
"The initial setup was easy."
"We have found the client dashboard to be very simple to use, especially in our Meraki environment."
"What I love most about the Meraki Dashboard are its user-friendly features."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The reporting has room for improvement."
"To get it started is a lot of work, since it comes empty. We had to push information into it to make it work."
"I would like to see a better UI, one which is more responsive."
"Improvements I would like to see include a discovery solution, better reports, and end-to-end monitoring."
"The problem with the reporting is you have to configure the report, and after that, you will have the same report every month, every week, every day. You have to sync it in order to have a great report."
"There is room for improvement in the area of artificial intelligence. The product gives us a lot of information, but it's only information. We want the product to do more auto-remediation."
"Opening a ticket on the website of Centreon can be difficult for my colleague, but not for me because my English is good. However, my colleague doesn't speak English well, as our company is in Quebec and our first language is French."
"This solution lacks service monitoring in the cloud."
"It's a very complex system. Customers have told me that sometimes there are lots of advanced features that are available and that you can change in the dashboard, but sometimes it's very hard to know what they are."
"The initial setup is complex and can be made more straightforward."
"One area that could use improvement in the Meraki Dashboard is user-friendliness when navigating to port configurations."
"The price could be lower because the license for access points is expensive."
"There are some issues with the NAT configuration, it is now impossible to some operations with the solution."
"They can improve the landing page in Meraki Dashboard. When I go into an organization, they can include a lot more infographics. They can also simplify it a bit and consolidate it. For example, if I've got five branches and I go into customer A's profile or organization, I'd like to see an infographic on the landing page providing a snippet of the entire network layout, that is, all branches in one snapshot. From there, I would like to go into the network that I want to work on or view."
"You can't really clone or replicate a device, that sort of feature would be useful. You can clone the site but you cannot clone the device."
"More integration would be an improvement."
Centreon is ranked 11th in Network Monitoring Software with 27 reviews while Meraki Dashboard is ranked 9th in Network Monitoring Software with 51 reviews. Centreon is rated 8.6, while Meraki Dashboard is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Centreon writes "Proactive reporting guides our NOC on what needs to be fixed, saving them time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Meraki Dashboard writes "Incredibly easy to use, great troubleshooting and prevention of malicious events". Centreon is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Nagios Core, Icinga and ServiceNow IT Operations Management, whereas Meraki Dashboard is most compared with Cisco DNA Center, SolarWinds NPM, ThousandEyes, Mist AI and Cloud and LogicMonitor. See our Centreon vs. Meraki Dashboard report.
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