Subscribe to our Newsletter!
By subscribing to our newsletter, you agree with our privacy terms
Home > Reviews > Enhance Your IT Infrastructure With These 10 Cisco Meraki Monitoring Tools
October 15, 2024
Cisco Meraki devices offer powerful capabilities for managing and optimizing network environments, and integrating these with comprehensive monitoring solutions can significantly enhance operational performance.
This article digs into the intricacies of effectively monitoring Cisco Meraki devices, presenting a curated list of ten tools that seamlessly integrate into existing monitoring frameworks. These tools are designed to streamline workflows and reduce complexity, enabling IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than get bogged down by operational challenges.
Whether you’re managing a small business network or a large-scale enterprise infrastructure, this guide offers valuable insights into achieving greater transparency, control, and efficiency in your network operations.
Cisco Meraki is a cloud-managed IT company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Their products include wireless access points, switches, security cameras and enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions, all managed through Meraki’s web-based dashboard interface.
This allows for simpler management of network hardware and software, as the infrastructure can be controlled and monitored over the internet without the need for traditional on-site management tools.
Meraki network devices are managed through the cloud, which simplifies the deployment, configuration, and management of the network. This is especially beneficial for organizations with limited IT resources or those that need to manage multiple sites.
The system is also designed to be scalable, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises. It allows for easy addition of new devices and users without significant changes to the existing infrastructure.
Meraki devices come with built-in security features, including firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems, and content filtering, ensuring that the network remains secure.
A centralized dashboard provides deep network insights, allowing administrators to see the status of their network in real-time, identify problems quickly, and apply necessary changes or policies directly from the cloud. The devices also automatically receive firmware and software updates, ensuring that the network is protected against the latest threats without manual intervention.
Cisco Meraki offers a set of APIs that allow for the automation of networking tasks and integration with other systems, enhancing operational efficiency. This is where the tools discussed in this article come in, as they integrate with the official Meraki API and dashboards, allowing you to centralize and streamline your monitoring and management infrastructure.
There are many reasons to invest in monitoring your Cisco Meraki devices. Here are five of them, in no particular order.
When selecting a Cisco Meraki monitoring tool, it’s essential to focus on characteristics that ensure comprehensive visibility, ease of use, scalability, security, and integration capabilities.
The tool should offer deep insights into the entire network infrastructure, including wireless, security, switching, and other connected devices. It should provide real-time analytics, health reports, and performance metrics of the network, enabling IT administrators to quickly identify and address issues before they impact the network’s performance.
A user-friendly interface is crucial for any monitoring tool. The ideal Cisco Meraki monitoring tool should have an intuitive dashboard that simplifies network management tasks. It should allow users to easily navigate through different features, set up alerts, and access detailed reports without a steep learning curve.
As organizations grow, their network infrastructure evolves. The chosen monitoring tool must be scalable, capable of handling an increasing number of devices and users without degrading performance. It should allow for seamless addition of new devices and scale with your network as it expands.
Given the critical importance of network security, the monitoring tool should include robust security features. These might include intrusion detection systems, security event alerts, and compliance reporting. The tool should help in proactively identifying vulnerabilities and potential security breaches, thereby safeguarding sensitive information.
The ability to integrate with other systems and applications is vital. A good Cisco Meraki monitoring tool should offer APIs or built-in integration capabilities that allow it to work seamlessly with existing IT infrastructure, management tools, and third-party applications. This facilitates a more cohesive and efficient IT environment, enabling automation and enhanced operational efficiency.
To ensure effective monitoring of your Cisco Meraki infrastructure, a structured approach is crucial, starting with defining specific monitoring needs such as device connectivity, data throughput, security threats, and performance metrics.
This clarity in objectives aids in selecting appropriate monitoring tools equipped with features like real-time monitoring, user-friendly dashboards, advanced analytics, and scalability to support ecosystem growth. The chosen tools should then be configured to gather extensive data from your Cisco Meraki devices, covering performance metrics, network health, security logs, and more, which is vital for troubleshooting and optimization.
Setting up alerts for critical metrics and events is essential for timely response to performance issues, preventing potential escalations. Regular review and analysis of the collected data are necessary for insights into the performance and health of your Cisco Meraki devices, which helps in identifying trends, potential bottlenecks, and assessing security measures, facilitating proactive system management and continuous improvement.
Security monitoring is crucial, focusing on detecting unauthorized access, malware, and data breaches. As your ecosystem expands, ensuring the scalability of the monitoring setup is critical to accommodate new devices and increased data volumes without performance loss. This involves maintaining comprehensive documentation of the monitoring setup, tools, configurations, and response procedures, alongside regular performance reporting, to evaluate the monitoring strategy’s effectiveness and identify improvement areas.
Staying updated with the evolving technologies and regularly reviewing the monitoring strategy and tools is crucial to ensure they remain effective and aligned with the monitoring objectives. Adopting new technologies and practices can significantly enhance monitoring capabilities.
Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor provides a comprehensive and user-friendly tool for monitoring Cisco Meraki networks, enhancing network reliability and simplifying management through cloud-based solutions.
PRTG is based on monitoring elements called “sensors”. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, like the traffic of a switch port, or the CPU load of a server. There are more than 250 built-in sensors for various tasks, device types, and use cases, and it is also possible to write and deploy custom sensors. Combined with customizable dashboards and a robust reporting system, this makes it easy to create a bespoke monitoring solution perfectly tailored for your needs.
PRTG integrates with Cisco Meraki by utilizing preconfigured sensors that interact with the Cisco Meraki dashboard API. This integration allows PRTG to effectively monitor various aspects of a Cisco Meraki environment, such as network health, device status, and license information of IoT devices, Meraki radio (MR) devices, Meraki switching (MS) devices, Meraki security (MX) devices and more. The integration process is straightforward, allowing users to easily incorporate their Cisco Meraki devices into PRTG’s centralized monitoring environment.
PRTG has an easy-to-understand pricing structure, where all plans have exactly the same feature set. The only difference is how many “aspects” of your devices you wish to monitor. According to Paessler, users usually monitor 10 aspects per device, so the base PRTG 500 plan should be enough to monitor 50 devices. A 30-day free trial is available.
LogicMonitor provides a comprehensive, unified management platform for network monitoring that increases visibility, accelerates troubleshooting, and optimizes network performance across all IT and network devices.
Its integration with Cisco Meraki provides comprehensive monitoring tools that aid organizations in managing and optimizing their Cisco Meraki device infrastructure, including security appliances, wireless access points, switches, and smart cameras.
It allows for visualization, trending, and forecasting of Cisco Meraki devices within a hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure. For Meraki security appliances, it provides monitoring for VPN tunnels, enabling issue triage and alert creation for capacity and connectivity issues. Helpful graphs and topology maps help diagnose network health.
The availability, health, and performance of both Cisco Meraki and Cisco Catalyst wireless access points can also be monitored, tracking metrics like connected users and radio utilization to predict bottlenecks and support future capacity planning. Health and performance monitoring and topology mapping of switches and smart cameras is also supported.
LogicMonitor is SaaS (Software as a Service) with a modular pricing structure. Prices vary with the number of monitored resources and which monitoring “package” you choose. For example, Infrastructure Monitoring and Cloud IaaS monitoring are charged separately. This granularity may sound good, but can lead to a situation where the features you need are spread across different modules, increasing the final price and making budgeting harder. A 14-day free trial is available.
Statseeker claims to be “the world’s fastest network performance monitoring solution” and provides fast, cost-effective network performance monitoring with extensive functionality tailored for high-efficiency and detailed insights, suitable for large networks up to 1 million interfaces.
The Meraki Module for Statseeker provides comprehensive monitoring and management capabilities for Cisco Meraki networks, enhancing visibility by consolidating views of Meraki and non-Meraki infrastructure, negating the need for multiple tools and increasing control over network performance, security, and data management.
It supports network monitoring for multiple Meraki technologies (MX, MR, MS) and device status tracking, enhancing cybersecurity posture and compliance tracking. It offers near-time contextual views across your whole Meraki environment and hierarchical infrastructure views, and provides granularity and long-term storage for high-resolution data without limits or restrictions.
Other features include details on client throughput, wireless latency, application data, security logs, VPN traffic, and interface metrics. There is no clear pricing information for StatSeeker on the official website. A 45-day free trial is available.
The SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability software provides comprehensive monitoring and management tools for both Meraki wireless and SD-WAN networks, allowing users to gather network insights in a single interface.
It integrates monitoring for Meraki Wireless LAN Controllers (WLC) and Meraki SD-WAN cloud orchestrators and provides a unified view, enabling users to monitor all Meraki devices through a single pane of glass. Node monitoring includes access point status, client data across networks, and SSID information via API.
The software enables easy discovery and bulk monitoring of Meraki SD-WAN orchestrator devices. Users can visualize SD-WAN topologies through auto-generated maps showing physical and logical connections.
Monitoring extends to SD-WAN edge devices with details like device names, IP addresses, models, and network IDs, ensuring network performance tracking. The tool also provides alerts for key SD-WAN events, enhancing operational efficiency, including alerts for device downtime or high utilization.
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is SaaS, available through four subscription plans, Essentials, Advanced, Essentials Enterprise Scale and Advanced Enterprise Scale. Like LogicMonitor, this tool is highly modular, something that can quickly increase prices and make it difficult to calculate precise costs. Specific pricing details are only available by quote, and a 14-day free trial is available.
Datadog provides a SaaS-based infrastructure monitoring service that offers metrics, visualizations, and alerting. The platform ensures complete coverage across any stack, including on-premise, hybrid, IoT, and multi-cloud environments.
It boasts built-in integrations for over 500 popular technologies. The Cisco Meraki integration offers comprehensive visibility into your environments by collecting metrics for Network Device Monitoring, Network Event Logs, and Security Event Logs for Cloud SIEM.
With this integration it is possible to monitor the client count, connection status, and throughput of MR devices (Wireless Access Points), port status, traffic, and error rates of MS devices (Switches) and VPN status, firewall rules, and device performance of MX devices (security appliances).
The integration can also monitor security event logs, generating alerts on events like intrusion detections, firewall rule violations, and malware threats, network event logs, including configuration changes and client associations, and network health events, like high packet loss on switches.
Datadog has a complex pricing structure that makes it hard to calculate costs. First, you need to choose among many options which kind of monitoring you need to do (ex: infrastructure or network monitoring). Then, you have to find the plan that better suits your needs. Some plans are priced per host, but others use different metrics, like the amount of data ingested. A 14-day free trial is available.
N-sight RMM, by N-Able, is an all-in-one Remote Management and Monitoring (RMM) solution that integrates IT management, remote access, ticketing, and billing at an affordable price to help managed service providers (MSPs) improve efficiency and profitability.
N-able and Cisco Meraki have partnered to allow for streamlined monitoring and management of Meraki devices through the N-central dashboard, enhancing network oversight and alert capabilities. N-central’s automation manager supports monitoring Meraki devices like any other network devices.
Users can view the status of client devices and receive notifications and alerts. Monitoring includes bandwidth statistics, device performance scores, network and organizational device statuses, organization-wide security events and organization license details.
N-Able N-Sight is SaaS available on a yearly subscription basis, starting at US$ 99 per month for monitoring 100 “nodes”. More detailed pricing is available by quote. A free trial is available.
Zabbix is a robust, enterprise-class open-source platform for comprehensive monitoring of various IT assets, from networks to servers, services, applications, and IoT devices, offering scalability, security, and flexibility for diverse IT environments.
It can be deployed either on-premise or in the cloud, giving users control over their data, an offers unlimited scalability for diverse infrastructures, distributed monitoring with secure, encrypted connections, high availability ensuring 24/7 uptime and integration with existing alerting, IoT, and ITSM systems using ready-made templates.
Zabbix has an official Meraki integration, allowing for effortless deployment of Cisco Meraki dashboard monitoring by Zabbix via HTTP, allowing you to centralize your monitoring efforts into a single tool and workflow. Besides that, Zabbix is also able to monitor Meraki devices using SNMP.
Like many other Open Source tools, Zabbix is completely free to use, without limitations. However, you must pay if you need professional technical support. This is available in five plans (Silver, Gold, Platinum, Enterprise and Global), each with a different number of support cases, availability and response times. Prices are available by quote.
Domotz provides comprehensive monitoring and remote management solutions for Cisco Meraki devices such as firewalls, network switches, and access points, enhancing network visibility and control through features like performance alerts, automated mapping, and advanced monitoring capabilities.
The integration with the Cisco Meraki Cloud allows for extended network management capabilities via the Meraki API. Key features include remote software reboots, PoE (Power over Ethernet) control, remote device access, and around-the-clock monitoring alerts. Automated network mapping and device identification are also available, providing real-time updates on network changes.
Advanced monitoring features allow for performance tracking of Cisco Meraki access points, including signal strength, traffic utilization, and Wi-Fi client details. Network topology maps are automatically generated and updated to track device connections and movements, and automated switch port mapping helps identify devices connected to specific ports on network switches from various manufacturers.
Domotz is available by subscription (monthly billing) in three plans, for “Online Customers”, “Channel Partners” and “IT Departments”. All have the same feature set, but differ on the need for a minimum commitment (on the Channel Partners and IT Department plans), SLAs and details such as data retention periods. A free trial is available.
Pandora FMS is an all-in-one monitoring solution that offers full observability to optimize IT operations and improve service quality across various infrastructures by integrating extensive monitoring capabilities into a single easy-to-use platform.
It is customizable, supports extensive integrations and offers global visibility across different IT components, integrating the monitoring of logs, networks, applications, servers, databases, and cloud environments without the need for multiple disparate tools.
Cisco Meraki can be integrated with Pandora FMS through the use of official plugins and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) modules, allowing comprehensive monitoring of network devices. Additionally, agents and modules can be created through plugins for specific devices such as appliance, switch, and wireless devices, enabling detailed monitoring of their operational status and traffic.
Pandora FMS is available as SaaS or on-premise, with monthly or annual subscriptions in five different tiers. Licenses are based on devices, not sensors or checks, and include unlimited access to a plugin library. A 30-day free trial is available.
New Relic offers a comprehensive, AI-powered observability platform that delivers complete visibility across all systems, enabling faster detection and resolution of issues, enhanced operational efficiency, and superior user experiences.
The platform supports over 30 capabilities and 750+ integrations, catering to diverse needs and tools used by engineers. Key capabilities include APM, AI monitoring, code profiling, log management, infrastructure monitoring, and security, with features such as AI-powered insights that quickly deliver actionable solutions to issues across systems.
New Relic integrates with the Cisco Meraki Dashboard using the official API. This integration allows you to pull various metrics related to the health of your Meraki environment into New Relic for comprehensive monitoring and analysis. You can add it to an existing SNMP container, or deploy it in a dedicated container and keep it separate from your other SNMP devices.
Pricing for New Relic is calculated based on the amount of data ingested per month plus the number of users of the platform. Users can be sorted into three categories (Basic, Core or Full Platform), with different prices for each category according to which edition of NewRelic (Standard, Pro or Enterprise) you are subscribing to. A free trial is available.
Among all these, our favorite Cisco Meraki monitoring tool is Paessler PRTG, as it “ticks all the boxes” in our list of desired characteristics, with easy setup, comprehensive visualization, automated alerts, and a free 30-day trial.
The built-in sensors cover many of the main use cases, without the need to purchase extras, so it can monitor your Cisco Meraki devices, but also your network, services, servers, IoT devices, cloud infrastructure, and much more. And it is extensible, which means you can deploy third-party sensors, or even develop your own, to cover specific needs.
Being a Cisco Meraki Technology Partner, PRTG offers seamless integration, top-notch monitoring features, and technical support. PRTG’s all-in-one tool eliminates the need for multiple monitoring solutions, reducing complexity and streamlining operations, leading to increased efficiency for your teams.
August 28, 2025
June 16, 2025
April 01, 2025
February 19, 2025
December 13, 2024
November 18, 2024
November 11, 2024
Previous
Best Practices for IoT Gateway Monitoring: Tools, Tips, and Top Solutions
Next
Network Monitoring Tools Compared: Paessler PRTG vs. ManageEngine OpManager
