How to Configure Meraki Health Smart Threshold Alerts
Overview
Meraki Health alerts are a category of Cisco Meraki dashboard alerts based on data captured by the Meraki Health solution. These alerts allow a network administrator to set alert triggers based on key parameters that are critical to a wireless network. The Dashboard displays the following alerts, as shown in the image below.
Step-by-step instructions
Configuring Meraki Health alerts
Configuring alerts for Meraki Health follows the same process as other alerts in the dashboard.
- Navigate to Network-wide > Configure > Alerts page.
- Locate the Meraki Health alerts section and configure the alert settings.
- To add additional recipients for a specific alert, use the configurable field below the alert.
The smart threshold alerts related to Meraki Health include the following:
- Clients have poor signal strength
- Clients having high bandwidth usage
Clients have poor signal strength
The alert triggers when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) value for a client connected to the configured SSID drops below a specific threshold for the configured amount of time. The following SNR values are available for this alert:
- Low: 10dB
- Medium: 15dB
- High: 20dB
The alert requires a minimum of five clients with an SNR below the configured threshold to trigger.
Clients having high bandwidth usage
The alert triggers when a client device on the configured SSID consumes a specified amount of bandwidth or higher within the defined time window. The following bandwidth usage values are available for this alert:
- Low: 25GB
- Medium: 50GB
- High: 75GB
Smart threshold alerts with auto baselining
Smart threshold alerts use historical data from the network on which the alert is configured. The dashboard analyzes up to 6 weeks of historical data to create a baseline threshold for wireless client onboarding metrics. Onboarding metrics include Association, Authentication, DHCP, and DNS. If the dashboard notices an anomaly or a deviation from the baseline while onboarding wireless clients, the dashboard triggers an alert. When a network administrator configures this alert, the user receives weekly email notifications.
If a user disables the smart thresholds functionality, the dashboard exposes individual parameters that the user can configure to track and trigger the alert. When smart thresholds are disabled, the user has direct, manual control over which SSID and onboarding step trigger the alert.
In the implementation, the smart threshold-based email alerts will be sent at a fixed 3-hour cadence window to reduce the number of emails sent during an anomaly.
When smart thresholds are disabled, the user selects a sensitivity option: low, medium, or high. The sensitivity option determines the percentage of clients that must fail to onboard, within the configured time window, before the dashboard triggers an alert:
- Low: 25% of clients failed to onboard
- Medium: 50% of clients failed to onboard
- High: 75% of clients failed to onboard