Meraki Assurance Overview Page
What is Assurance Overview?
Assurance Overview is a new assurance feature/page we are building to enable network administrators to understand the overall health of their network across their entire stack and to provide quality experiences to their customers. The goal is to empower network administrators to easily monitor their network health across the full stack and quickly identify and troubleshoot problematic areas.
What it is
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Enable network administrators to understand the overall health of their network across their entire stack.
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Empowers network administrators to quickly monitor network health and easily identify and troubleshoot problematic areas.
Goal of the Assurance Overview
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Create a unified assurance experience.
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Improve network administrator's experience so they can accurately evaluate and maintain quality of experiences for end-users.
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Improve end-user’s experience so they can securely, seamlessly, and reliably access business critical network resources.
Who is eligible?
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Anyone is eligible, but customers with these qualifications will benefit the most from the Assurance Overview:
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Have a minimum of 2 tiers of Meraki products, 3 preferred, Customers with full stack configurations will see more benefits
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Possess either MI license or SD-WAN+ license.
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The Assurance Overview Page will be available to be enabled in the Early Access section of the Organization menu around mid-July 2024.
How do I provide feedback?
Providing feedback is as easy as selecting the “Give Feedback” blue tab on the right side of screen (make sure ad blockers are off for this page) and the “Give your feedback” button in the lower right corner of the screen (See figure below).
Where do I find the Assurance Overview?
When you log into the Dashboard you will be greeted with a new menu item in the left hand navigation list. The Assurance Overview page (along with other assurance related tools) can be found here. This will bring you to the new Assurance Overview page, here you will see multiple modules that report various aspects of network health as it relates to the overall network, clients, devices, and applications.
What is on the Assurance Overview Page?
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The top module shows the network health score, this is a combined score taking into account different weighted aspects of network health to give an overall health of the environment
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The timeline next to it gives you a look at the network health over a time span governed by the time selector at the top
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Next are the impact sections which give you a view as to how many clients are impacted for each type of alert that is/has been active in the system.
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The Client module breaks this down by connection type, wireless, remote, and wired
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The Network devices module shows context for the Cisco first party devices in the network
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The applications module provides information on how large the client impact is for errors in the Application environment. This module is sourced from Thousand Eyes data that is entered elsewhere in the Dashboard for web services that you are tracking.
Client Impact Module
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You can highlight and select one of the buckets in the modules and this will open a side drawer that slides in from the right of the screen, with more details about that specific bucket.
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In this side drawer you’ll be given a list of specific metrics and a further breakdown of the client impact.
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Clicking on one of the metrics will provide further details, drilling down to the actual client list level.
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At the top you’ll also see a pie chart visualization that provides further visual breakdown to help assess priority.
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Here you can see details on the clients or be taken to the client details page to get more information on that client.
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On the details page there are search and filter boxes to help refine what you are looking for.
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Clicking on one of the client links under impacted clients in the detail side drawer will take you to the client detail page
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Here you get a full picture of what Dashboard and Assurance know about the client to aid in troubleshooting.
Network Devices Impact Module
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Selecting one of the buckets in the Network Devices Module will open a side drawer (slide in from right) and give you context on the metrics impacting that device in the time period represented in the time filter
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Selecting a specific metric will drill down into a list of the impacted devices for that metric.
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Clicking on a device name in the impact list (like the client impact module) will take you to the device's detail page to get more information about the device and its current condition
Application Impact Module
The Application Impact Module provides simplified and rich visibility into the health and current status of the customers critical applications. This module leverages our native integration with the ThousandEyes Enterprise agent that runs natively inside the Meraki MX Appliance and provides active monitoring data.
Requirements
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Successful onboarding and installation of the ThousandEyes agent on the Meraki MX. For more details please refer to our Solution Requirements section in the Meraki MX ThousandEyes configuration guide.
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SD-WAN+ Licensing.
The application module consists of two sections, the main Application view that’s available on the Assurance Overview page and the detailed information drawers, which appear on the right side of the Dashboard once they are invoked.
Main Application View
The Main Application view provides a quick overview of the performance and health of the applications being monitored in the network. This view contains several data points that reflect the impact of any outage or performance degradation affecting the applications during the time frame specified above.
ThousandEyes Score: This score is provided by ThousandEyes and is affected by the performance of the application as measured by the ThousandEyes Agent. Metrics that are used to calculate this score are: Packet Loss, Latency, Jitter and Application Availability (any HTTP response code from the Application greater than 400 results in the App being unavailable).
Impact Score: Also known as Customer Experience Score, it reflects the overall score for all the applications in the network. This score is the aggregated ThousandEyes score for each application weighted by the number of impacted clients over active clients during the selected time period. It reflects the overall score for all the applications in the network.
Points change: Show how the score has changed when compared to the previous time period. For example, if the data requested is for the last 2 hours it will show how the score has changed from the previous period of 2 hours.
Detailed Information Drawers
The detailed information drawers are opened to the right side of the dashboard once an application card is clicked. Currently the drawer is three levels deep and they provide information following the progressive disclosure principle.
First Drawer
This drawer highlights two layers where application issues might exist. The first layer is the Internet layer and the second is the Application layer.
Internet Layer: Covers any issue that can be caused by packet loss or latency from the Meraki MX Appliance to the Application Server across the internet.
Application Layer: Covers the performance and potential issues seen from the Application server regarding response time and availability.
Both buckets will show the number of potentially impacted clients if there’s an issue or outage. The second drawer can be accessed by clicking on either of these cards.
Second Drawer
The second drawer provides detailed information on the value of the metrics that are captured for each layer and current or previous alerts that caused an outage or a performance degradation event. Example of for the Internet card, we see the Loss and Latency metrics and their values during the selected time period:
The metrics displayed for the second drawer are:
Internet: Loss and Latency
Application: Availability and Response Time
The second drawer will always include any information on triggered alerts, if any, that results in a performance issue for the network clients. If there are multiple alerts during that time and some are resolved, they will be ordered from latest to oldest, with the active alert always at the top. The third and final drawer can be accessed by clicking on one of the alerts.
Third Drawer
The third and final drawer focuses on showing the impacted clients by the previously selected alert.
This final drawer also allows the redirection to the ThousandEyes platform if more information for this particular outage is needed. Please keep in mind that the ThousandEyes portal will require your login information if you have not already logged in.