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.

Scope

The initial scope of the Assurance Overview page will cover the core infrastructure products.  MX, MS, MR

What it is 

• Enable network administrators to understand the overall health of their network across their entire stack.

• Empowers network administrators to quickly monitor network health and easily identify and troubleshoot problematic areas.

Goal of the Assurance Overview

• Create a unified assurance experience.

• Improve network administrator's experience so they can accurately evaluate and maintain quality of experiences for end-users.

• Improve end-user’s experience so they can securely, seamlessly, and reliably access business critical network resources.

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?

• 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

• 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

• 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.

• The Client module breaks this down by connection type, wireless, remote, and wired

• The Network devices module shows context for the Cisco first party devices in the network

• 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

• 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.

• In this side drawer you’ll be given a list of specific metrics and a further breakdown of the client impact.

• Clicking on one of the metrics will provide further details, drilling down to the actual client list level.

• At the top you’ll also see a pie chart visualization that provides further visual breakdown to help assess priority.

• Here you can see details on the clients or be taken to the client details page to get more information on that client.

• On the details page there are search and filter boxes to help refine what you are looking for.

 

 

• Clicking on one of the client links under impacted clients in the detail side drawer will take you to the client detail page

• Here you get a full picture of what Dashboard and Assurance know about the client to aid in troubleshooting.

Network Devices Impact Module

• 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

• Selecting a specific metric will drill down into a list of the impacted devices for that metric.

• 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

 

Infrastructure Impact Module

The infrastructure Impact Module displays aspects of the core infrastructure related to LAN, WAN, VPN and RF (WLAN).  Each sub-section will open a side drawer with more context allowing for the user to drill down on the selected metric you want to get insight about.

For LAN these metrics are tracked and used for scoring

• STP (Spanning Tree protocol)
• Storm Control (Broadcast and Multicast traffic)
• VRRP (Virtual Routing Redundancy Protocol)
• Link errors

For WAN these metrics are tracked and used for scoring

• WAN Link Status
  • Loss
  • Latency

For VPN the Auto-VPN tunnels are tracked and used for scoring

• Connectivity
• Latency
• Usage

For RF (WLAN) 5 GHz and 6 GHz frequencies are currently tracked for scoring along with individual metrics.

• Neighbor Score
• Interference Score
• Noise Score
• Client Score

Application Impact Module

The Application Impact Module provides simplified and rich visibility into the health and current status of the customer's critical applications. This module leverages our native integration with the ThousandEyes Enterprise agent, which runs natively inside the Meraki MX Appliance and provides active monitoring data.

An application will appear in this section after it has been configured to be monitored using the Active Application Monitoring workflow under the Insight Menu.

Configuration Changes Timeline

To streamline troubleshooting, the assurance overview page now includes a configuration change log. This feature allows users to swiftly determine if recent configuration changes might be impacting network performance. For a more in-depth analysis of a particular change, users can click on the associated hyperlink to be taken directly to the pre-filtered Organization >> Change log page.