Network-wide Health Views
After reviewing the high-level summaries at the organization level, it’s time to drill down into some of the network-specific pages and views to get a more detailed picture of the health and overall status of a network and its clients.
Network-wide and Uplink Health
To get to the detailed reports and data for a given network in an organization, click the network name from the Organization Summary or Organization Overview page, or select the network from the Networks panel on the left.
After navigating to a specific network, you are presented with the Network-wide > Clients page. The Health section, shown in Figure 3-16, provides a quick reference report for the uplink status (if available) and the device statuses of any Meraki hardware currently added to the network. From this section of the page, you can click each icon to view the product details page for each hardware platform available.
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Figure 3-16 The Network Health Summary on the Network-wide > Clients Page
Below the Health section is the Clients section, which includes a list of all recently seen clients on the network, a summary of traffic and client usage, and a more detailed traffic analysis of client traffic, which you can view by selecting the Show link under the Applications pie chart to the right of the usage summary. An example of the fully expanded Application Details view is shown in Figure 3-17.
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Figure 3-17 Application Visibility on the Network-wide > Clients Page
The Application Details section is powered by Cisco Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR), which provides visibility into more than 1500 of the most popular applications. NBAR-enabled platforms are able to better analyze and identify client traffic to enforce more granular Layer 7 firewall rules and policies, configurable from the Security & SD-WAN > Firewall page (see Figure 3-18) or within a Network-wide > Group Policy (see Figure 3-19), allowing for tighter policing of user traffic with less effort than ever before.
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Figure 3-18 An Example Set of Layer 7 Firewall Rules Utilizing Several NBAR-Based Application Rulesets
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Figure 3-19 An Example of the Detailed Application-Level Granularity Available for Devices Using NBAR
To confirm the minimum supported firmware versions for Meraki MX, MS, and MR platforms to allow enabling of NBAR functionality, visit https://documentation.meraki.com and view the article ‘Next-gen Traffic Analytics – Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR) Integration.’ You can find more information about NBAR classifications in the same article and by viewing Cisco’s NBAR-related documentation at www.cisco.com (search for the keyword NBAR).
Wireless Network Health
Wireless networks sometimes are prone to issues, whether they be deployment related, client related, or even just environmental. Fortunately, the Meraki platform has again embraced the power of the cloud to actively monitor and report on the health and performance of any Meraki wireless networks.
The Wireless Health feature of the Meraki Dashboard offers some significant advantages when trying to troubleshoot issues such as client connectivity or authentication failures. As an example, Figure 3-20 shows the health overview for a wireless network on a Cisco Meraki campus. From this page, it’s clear that the network and its clients are functioning smoothly overall and without issue.
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Figure 3-20 The Wireless Overview for a Cisco Meraki Campus, Showing a Well-Functioning Wireless Network with No Notable Issues
Now if you compare that with the view in Figure 3-21 from a different network, the value of the Wireless Health feature and its ability to clearly demonstrate client-impacting issues becomes immediately obvious, as you can quickly and easily see at a glance that there is an authentication-related issue for several devices, unlike the previous network shown in Figure 3-20.
From this point, you can review the rest of the report to get more details about where the issue may lie. The rest of the Wireless Health page reports several other helpful perspectives, such as issues by SSID, AP, individual client, and even by device type, to help scope and further narrow down potentially impacting issues. This makes it easy to determine if a specific SSID is improperly configured, if a specific AP is connected to an incorrect port, or if a specific client or client type is having issues that are otherwise not present for other clients or client types.
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Figure 3-21 The Wireless Health Report for an Example Network, Showing Failures Relating to Authentication for Two Clients
As Figure 3-22 shows for a simple home network, the Wireless Health feature can provide extremely valuable information when you’re trying to determine the potential scope and impact of a reported behavior.
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Figure 3-22 Additional Details of the Wireless Health Report for the Network Showing Client Authentication Issues
As just demonstrated, Meraki’s Wireless Health feature helps to take the guesswork out of attempting to triage a wireless issue by providing important details that help to determine the scope and impact of a behavior from a quickly accessible and easy to interpret report. This helps to save time and refocus troubleshooting efforts in appropriate directions, leading to a faster time to resolution for many issues than a more traditional troubleshooting approach.
The Wireless Health feature is discussed in much further detail in Chapter 8, “Introduction to Meraki MR Access Points.”