Dashboard Early Access Program
Meraki is continuously working to enhance the design of the Dashboard to improve performance and usability for its customers. This effort includes developing new features and pages to improve the Dashboard experience. You can explore the latest features and pages opting in to the Dashboard Early Access program.
To opt in to specific Early Access Dashboard features, go to the Organization > Early Access Program page, shown in Figure 3-8, and use the toggle switches to enable or disable new features in the Dashboard, such as new pages, UI designs, or new features, before they are pushed to the wider Dashboard audience. To give you an idea of what types of enhancements are available through the Early Access Program, the following subsections briefly introduce a few of the currently available options (marked 1 through 4 in Figure 3-8) that are particularly relevant to the day-to-day administrator experience. Keep in mind that new features are always being developed, so this is just a snapshot of the future of the Meraki Dashboard at the time of writing.
Magnetic Design System
Use this toggle to enable the newest iteration of the Dashboard UI, known as Magnetic, which not only overhauls the visual appearance of the Dashboard while maintaining a familiar layout but also enables the options for many more related features and pages within the new UI. This new design also acts as a building block of the new, next-generation unified Cisco UI design coming to modern Cisco dashboards.
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Figure 3-8 The Meraki Early Access Program Page, Allowing You to Opt In or Out of New Dashboard Features
New Landing Page
Use this toggle to enable the Organization Summary page, shown in Figures 3-9 and 3-10, which provides an updated and clearer high-level overview of the health of devices across all the networks in your organization. You can view this page after enabling the feature by navigating to Organization > Summary.
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Figure 3-9 The Health Section of the New Organization Summary Page Available in the New Landing Page
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Figure 3-10 The Networks Section of the New Organization Summary Page for Networks Within the Cisco Meraki Organization
The Networks section of this page reports a more detailed device health summary for each network, allowing you to quickly assess the status and health of each network across the organization more easily than ever before.
New Organization Alert Page & Alert Hub Enhancement
Use this toggle to enable the Organization Alerts page, shown in Figure 3-11, as well as the network-level Alert Hub. The Organization Alerts page provides a consolidated view of alerts for all platforms deployed across the organization. To access this page, navigate to Organization > Alerts from any Dashboard page.
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Figure 3-11 The New Organization Alerts Page
The Organization Alerts view provides an easy to check report of device statuses across all networks in an organization and can be filtered to narrow the displayed results based on severity, alert type, network, or device type. This provides an excellent top-down view of any alerts present across an organization regardless of organization size or deployment distribution, which results in a shorter time to identify issues, leading to a quicker time to resolution.
When working on any page within an individual network, the network-level Alert Hub notification icon appears in the upper-right corner of the window, as shown in Figure 3-12. This feature provides an easy to access view that consolidates all alerts for the current network into a single panel, as shown in Figure 3-13. These are the same alerts that you can view from the Organization Alerts page but filtered to show only alerts for the currently selected network. From this panel, you can quickly navigate to a problematic device or easily triage a series of alerts for a given network to make addressing the inevitable issue a less stress-inducing task.
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Figure 3-12 The Alert Hub Notification Icon
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Figure 3-13 The Alert Hub Notification Panel for the Cisco Meraki San Francisco Campus Network
For more information on the new Organization Alerts page and Alert Hub, visit https://documentation.meraki.com and view the “Alerts” article.
Switching Overview
Use this toggle to access the new Switching Overview feature, which consolidates key performance indicators and provides crucial planning information related to switches in a given network. Details like port utilization, PoE budget, and more help Dashboard users to have clearer visibility when reviewing device provisioning and statuses, thereby assisting in planning for future network needs.
You can access the Switching Overview panel after enabling the feature by going to the Network-wide > Clients page of any network and selecting the Switches modal of the Health section, as demonstrated in Figure 3-14.
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Figure 3-14 The New Switching Overview Feature
More information on the new Switching Overview feature is available at documentation.meraki.com in the “Switching Overview – MS Health” document.