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Not a day goes by when our engineers aren’t looking for ways to enhance the Meraki dashboard experience for network administrators. It’s always a balancing act, adding just enough without adding too much. Some decisions about the UI design are easier than others, and today we’re covering a simple change which will help admins maintain their switches.

Last Autumn, we announced a significant expansion of our switching portfolio to 14 models. Many of the new models include redundant power options, making them better suited to mission critical 24×7 environments where downtime simply isn’t an option.

The dashboard already provides the most useful information about switch status, including Spanning Tree root bridge, online ports, those serving power and how much of the switch’s power budget is being consumed, all in real time.

We’ve added status information for the power supplies on our MS220, 320 and 420 switch lines, providing at-a-glance visibility into issues and any failures which occur. First of all, in the ‘Switches’ list we’ve added a new column titled ‘Alerts’ which will show when a switch is unreachable or has an issue, such as a power supply failure. In this example we can see that a couple of switches are showing an alert for power:

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Clicking on the switch will go to the usual switch status page, where we’ve now added further details to quickly pinpoint the problem. In this case, the 48 port MS320 switch has two power supplies installed and one is currently offline.

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Small enhancements like this make all the difference to the workflow of the network engineer, particularly if there is no IT resource on a branch site. In this case the admin could simply blink the LEDs on the switch and then direct a local member of staff to the comms room to swap-out power supply number 1 on the switch with the blinking LEDs. Easy, quick.

We’re continually striving to improve the network management experience through incremental steps both big and small, so stay tuned for more goodies.