SolarWinds-Cisco Meraki Integration Improves Device Monitoring

MSPs can now more easily discover and monitor Cisco Meraki devices from within their SolarWinds N-central dashboards.

SolarWinds has expanded its monitoring capabilities within the Cisco Meraki Marketplace. The integration includes routers, switches and access points as part of the portfolio of Cisco Meraki cloud-managed offerings.

SolarWinds MSP partners can see the status of Cisco Meraki customers’ devices right in their monitoring and management dashboard. They also can enable notifications and alerts, and monitor connectivity and traffic, as well as conduct license warranty reporting.

Mav Turner is SolarWinds MSP’s group vice president of product management.

SolarWinds’ Mav Turner

“The integration of Cisco Meraki with N-central gives MSP techs the ability to more effectively identify and resolve end user connectivity issues,” he said. “This is done by delivering the Meraki infrastructure data in the context of detailed endpoint data from N-central.”

MSPs can more easily spot potential issues that may be impacting a specific user. And they can troubleshoot those issues quickly and improve their end-customer experiences.

SolarWinds Investing in MSP Partners

This integration is one example of how SolarWinds is investing in a “more transparent and fully integrated ecosystem for our MSP partners,” Turner said. MSP partners need this to be efficient and accelerate growth.

“Leveraging N-central Automation Manager, we’re able to rapidly spin up these types of integrations and we’re also giving our partners a self-service model where they can easily do it themselves,” he said. “In fact, we’ve created an Automation Cookbook to make this even easier.”

MSPs have never been in higher demand, Turner said. Those who take advantage of more automated capabilities will have a significant competitive advantage.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, usage patterns are all over the place, he said. This makes the technician’s job feel a bit like “throwing a dart at the wall” when troubleshooting user issues.

“If they don’t know where someone is, they can’t really tell where the problem originates,” Turner said. “The integration with Cisco Meraki devices within the N-central platform gives techs more dynamic monitoring capabilities so they can see where the device sits, and get a faster handle on remediation.”

“Like most IT service providers, we’re more hyper-focused than ever right now, making sure the businesses we serve are up and running and secure,” said Jeffrey Bowles, IT lead/partner at Act360 Web & IT, a SolarWinds partner. “To do that effectively, we have to be able to work as efficiently as possible. Having more visibility and direct monitoring of our Cisco Meraki devices from within our SolarWinds N-central dashboard is a key piece of the efficiency puzzle, and we’re excited to have this new capability.”