Meraki Health Alerts - Smart Thresholds
Meraki Health alerts are a special category of Meraki dashboard alerts that are based on the data captured by the Meraki Health solution. This will allow a network administrator to set alert triggers based on some key parameters that are critical to any wireless network. Below are the alerts that are added to the dashboard:
Configuring Meraki Health Alerts
Configuring alerts for Meraki Health are simple and follow the same process as any other alert in the dashboard. These alerts can be found in Network-wide > Configure > Alerts page. If a network administrator would like to add additional recipients for specific alerts, then those can be added by using the configurable field just below the alert.
The smart threshold alerts related to Meraki Health currently include the following:
- Clients have poor signal strength
- Clients having high bandwidth usage
Clients have poor signal strength
This alert will trigger if the SNR (signal to noise ratio) value for any client connected to the configured SSID goes below a specific threshold for the configured amount of time. The values of SNR available to be selected for this alert are:
-
Low: 10dB
- Medium: 15dB
- High: 20dB
There must be a minimum of 5 clients with a SNR below the configured threshold to trigger the alert.
Clients having high bandwidth usage
This alert will trigger if a client device on the configured SSID is consuming a specified amount of bandwidth (or higher) in the defined window of time. The values for bandwidth usage available to be selected for this alert are:
- Low: 25GB
- Medium: 50GB
- High: 75GB
Smart Threshold Alerts with Auto Baselining
Smart threshold alerts are triggered by using historical data from the dashboard network each alert is configured on. The dashboard will look at data up to 6 weeks in the past, and will use that data to create a baseline threshold for the onboarding metrics of wireless clients. These onboarding metrics include Association, Authentication, DHCP and DNS. If the dashboard notices an anomaly or a deviation from the baseline when onboarding the wireless clients, an alert will be triggered. When a network administrator configures this alert, the user will receive emails that will be sent on a weekly basis.
If a user selects to not use the smart thresholds functionality, the dashboard will expose individual parameters that a user can configure to track and trigger the alert for. When opting to not use smart thresholds, a user will have more direct, manual control over which SSID and which onboarding step will be monitored and triggered with this alert.
In the current 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 not using smart thresholds, the sensitivity of the alert is selected among options including low, medium and high. The sensitivity options determine whether alerts are triggered based on the following percentage changes from the total number of clients being onboarded in the configured time window.
- Low: 25% of clients failed to onboard
- Medium: 50% of clients failed to onboard
- High: 75% of clients failed to onboard