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New features help MSPs manage end customer networks

Introducing Cisco Meraki’s MSP portal, support ticketing, and more!

We’ve got some great tools for managed services providers (MSPs) who offer Cisco Meraki’s wireless, switching, security appliance, and MDM as a service to their end customers. These tools address common MSP challenges around managing end customer networks, optimizing costs, transitioning customer networks to a hosted service quickly, and scaling those networks as needed.

Today, we’re excited to announce additional, new features for MSPs:

  • MSP Portal: A central location for staff to monitor all of their Cisco Meraki end customer networks over the web
  • Support ticketing: Create, monitor, and respond to support cases with Cisco Meraki staff
  • Custom branding: MSPs can brand the Cisco Meraki dashboard and summary reports to reinforce their brand message to end customers

These new features, combined with the built-in end-­to-­end visibility and control provided by Cisco Meraki’s cloud management platform, provide powerful ways for MSPs to keep their customer networks up-­to-­date and centrally managed.

 

MSP Portal

The new MSP portal, built into the Cisco Meraki dashboard, gives MSPs a single location to evaluate end customers’ licensing compliance and networked devices.

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Easily manage licensing compliance and end customer network devices using the MSP Portal.

From the MSP portal page, click into any of your managed customer networks and use Cisco Meraki’s Live Tools to remotely troubleshoot appliances; or use the dashboard to monitor users, devices, and application traffic, set group-­based policies, update licensing, and manage customers’ device inventory. You get end-­to-­end visibility of your customers’ networks from any Internet-accessible location—whether that’s at a NOC/SOC or your field offices.

 

Support ticketing

Keeping track of support cases across multiple end customer networks can be daunting, but we simplify things with a central location to create, monitor, and respond to troubleshooting tickets alongside Cisco Meraki staff. Cases are organized so that sorting cases by end customer—even down to individual customer networks—is easy.

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Sort troubleshooting tickets by priority, status, case number, date created, or support engineer.

With Cisco Meraki support ticketing, you can keep track of relevant emails, files, and case descriptions for a particular problem within a single ticket and prioritize cases based on severity.

Custom branding

As the networking provider and primary support for end customers, MSPs need the ability to reinforce their brand message when administrators access the network. As part of the MSP Dashboard, Cisco Meraki will work with our partners to put a custom logo on both the main dashboard and summary emails that are sent to end customers.

Cost optimization

Reducing operational costs is a key challenge for MSPs, who must typically build out end customer network infrastructure, adjust for vendor licensing costs, and provide tech support for issues that arise. With Cisco Meraki, our cloud­-hosted management infrastructure eliminates the need for MSPs to build out data centers or host wireless LAN controllers and similar infrastructure. Our simple licensing scheme, which includes all product tech support, maintenance, and feature updates, streamlines cost models. Finally, our intuitive, cloud­-based dashboard allows engineers to remotely troubleshoot devices and reduces staff training hours.

On-­demand scalability

It’s easy to quickly transition end customer networks to Cisco Meraki. All of our gear allows for zero­touch configuration, with no onsite IT staff needed for deployment. Adding network devices is as simple as entering an order number into the Cisco Meraki dashboard—there is no device limit, throughput limit, or backend configuration necessary. Our datacenters are designed from the ground up to scale your customers’ networks to millions of attached devices—and we have built­-in redundancy across multiple geographies, all with a 99.99% uptime SLA.

If you’d like more details on these new MSP features—and additional benefits Cisco Meraki provides vis­-à-­vis managing end customer networks—please read our new MSP white paper.