Using the MSP Portal to Manage Multiple Organizations
Some features of Dashboard span the entire Organization/Dashboard account. This may not be ideal for Managed Service Providers who administer the network infrastructure of separate business entities. As a best practice, the MSP may wish to create individual Dashboard accounts for each company they manage. To aid MSPs in the management of multiple customer organizations, Dashboard provides the MSP portal feature, which allows an admin to access multiple organizations with a single set of credentials.
Configuring the MSP Portal
An admin can create multiple Dashboard accounts using the same email address. When a new account is created using the same credentials, the MSP Portal feature in Dashboard will automatically activate and be displayed so the user account with access to multiple organizations can switch between them. There is no additional configuration necessary to enable MSP portal.
Note: When creating a new account using an existing email address, make sure the credentials are identical so the MSP portal can sync correctly.
Likewise, deleting an administrator from an organization will remove that organization from their MSP Portal so they may no longer navigate to it. If an administrator is removed from all but one organization, the MSP Portal will automatically deactivate and no longer be displayed in their Dashboard view.
The following best practices are recommended when creating multiple Organizations:
- Create a unique name for each Organization to avoid confusion.
- Licenses, user accounts, and site-to-site VPN, and device inventory are organization-wide. Because of this, deploy a separate Organization for each budgetary group/company.
- When creating the Organization an email is required. This email is used as the administrative login for the Dashboard account. Therefore it should not be a personal email. This will allow recovery of the account if there is a change in personnel.
Note: SAML administrators must select an organization to clone for creation to ensure that they can properly access the new organization.
Using the MSP Portal
Once the new Dashboard account is created, the MSP Portal functionality will be activated automatically. If you have multiple Accounts with the same login, an Organization selector will be present beside the network selector at the top of every page in Dashboard. When you select an Organization from the drop down, you will then see the networks contained in that Organization in corresponding network drop down:
Additional Resources
The following articles contain additional information that may be helpful for Managed Service Providers using the Cisco Meraki platform:
Best Practice for Setting up Networks as a Managed Service Provider (MSP)