We performed a comparison between Meraki Dashboard and SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer 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."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"We find that Meraki has all the features you need to be able to enable complex network protocols for AV equipment. We deal with a streaming product over IP, and Meraki is fantastic at that."
"There are some whitelist blacklist capabilities in the MX dashboard, which is very helpful."
"We like how Meraki Dashboard lets you manage all the devices in a single pane of glass. The dashboard is intuitive and easy to use. They are constantly updating the functionality. Switches from other vendors have the same features for the life of the device, but Meraki is always improving."
"It has improved my organization in the way that we've got a much better wireless coverage than we had before, and secondly, we have the visibility of all the users."
"Meraki Dashboard does not require a lot of maintenance. Cisco tells communicates through the Meraki Dashboard web client, it will automatically send updates to the equipment. They will send you an email on what day the updates will take place. If you want to proceed, you can click on accept, or you can decline them and schedule the updates at another time."
"The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass that gives you multisite visibility."
"An excellent dashboard that is currently unique in covering both SD-WAN and SD-LAN with built-in security."
"The ability of the product to perform with simplicity of deployment make it a valuable solution."
"The program is scalable enough for our usage."
"What I like the most is the bandwidth assessment."
"The bandwidth monitoring functionality is one of the most important features for our customers. When the customer notices that their bandwidth usage is too high for some reason, they will use the traffic analysis within SolarWinds NTA to identify which protocols (e.g. HTTPS) or applications are using up the bandwidth."
"With SolarWinds, we are now able to accurately gauge bandwidth consumption."
"NTA's most valuable feature is traffic analysis and visibility."
"I like that it is able to monitor multiple devices and it's vendor-agnostic."
"What I like about SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is that it's useful for analyzing traffic. It also has an application visibility feature that lets you control applications."
"What people found most valuable in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is its report customization feature."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The solution has a limited routing table and needs improvement by increasing the numbers as well as providing a summarization for the table."
"There is a bit of a problem when you try to log in and you don't have a fixed IP address. If you're granting access, you need to log in by using the IP address. If your administrator's IP address is not a fixed IP address and it has changed, you might need to update the changed IP address in the interface. For this, you need to log in to the interface to update the IP address. This issue might not have so much to do with Meraki interface."
"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."
"It would be nicer if the dashboard was lighter."
"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."
"The downside to the simplicity is that you can't get as granular as you could with the Cisco APs."
"They could offer API functionality for Meraki Dashboard. It will help us develop software immediately using available solutions."
"I would like to see an alert event feature to monitor what users are downloading and how to block some applications."
"It's scalable, but it could be simplified because it's not completely easy."
"There are some areas for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer. There are some challenges with the solution when compared to other monitoring tools such as difficulty in operations and difficulty with backup installation. My team is currently trying out different solutions but would need to see how it goes."
"It is very slow to pick the dynamics of the network."
"An area for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is the dashboarding. The user interface also has room for improvement because it's currently clunky."
"This solution does not do a very good job when I am trying to look deeper into my internal network, in particular with respect to individual ports."
"It's not a cheap product, so the pricing could be improved."
"Customer Support is quite complex."
"If your network is on SolarWinds, and you notice that the traffic is bad because it says "user downloading a heavy file," it doesn't indicate which endpoint is downloading those heavy files. SolarWinds doesn't have the tools to be able to handle this kind of situation. You can just notice through your network device that the traffic is becoming overwhelming or heavy, but you cannot go inside and get more details related to the endpoint where it is happening. We would like SolarWinds to be able to handle this kind of situation and even manage the traffic inside a network from the endpoint to the network device. These would be good enhancements. It is mostly stable. The problem comes only when we want to add another SolarWinds model. SolarWinds has so many models, and sometimes when we want to add other models on the platforms that are reserved for our firm, it freezes. When this happens, we have to create a new VM for that model."
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Meraki Dashboard is ranked 9th in Network Monitoring Software with 51 reviews while SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is ranked 6th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 34 reviews. Meraki Dashboard is rated 8.6, while SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is rated 7.6. 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 SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer writes "Displays traffic visibility and efficient traffic flows". Meraki Dashboard is most compared with SolarWinds NPM, ThousandEyes, Mist AI and Cloud, Cisco DNA Center and Zabbix, whereas SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is most compared with ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer, Cisco Secure Network Analytics, Zabbix and SolarWinds NPM. See our Meraki Dashboard vs. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer report.
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