If you’re like us, you’re stuck at home and looking for ways to mix up your remote work routine. Now that you’re no longer commuting, are you giving your podcasts less love/listens? There are so many great discussions to catch up on – including this week’s newest episode! (Find us and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify, or stream through the episode linked below.)
Tuning in this week is sure to help in the following ways:
Simulate the ambient workplace banter you’re missing these days
Give your eyes a chance to recover from all the screen time
Give you some insight into how others are using Meraki APIs to add value and new experiences to the Meraki platform!
In this week’s Meraki Unboxed Podcast, Episode 12we’re talking with yet another technology partner that has built a turnkey solution on top of the Meraki API services: Splash Access. Splash Access has been building Cisco Meraki captive portals for almost 7 years – taking advantage of our longest standing API service for captive portal development.
We’ve all interacted with a captive portal in some form or another (guest Wi-Fi at the airport, hotels, coffee shops, or our corporate networks) and we might feel like we’ve heard it all already: how to use captive portals to monetize Wi-Fi, drive customer engagement programs, use splash pages for advertising or even integrating social media initiatives, etc. etc. Splash Access has a new story to tell on this episode: solving the problem of seamlessly and securely getting IoT devices onto the network, with the right policies and rules applied.
So, how did a captive portal builder solve onboarding for devices that cannot access a captive portal? Tune in to learn how Splash Access used Cisco Meraki APIs to solve this problem from higher education to shared working spaces, retail, tenant blocks, and within large corporations.
As always, we are thrilled to showcase innovative solutions like this from our technology partners – enabled through the Meraki APIs. There is so much potential to unlock by integrating and building off of Meraki technologies – we’re excited to see what Splash Access and others come up with next! Listen in for a teaser ;)
“We try and take advantage of all the APIs that we are given. This is the exciting thing with working with Meraki – every month there’s new APIs coming onboard, and we look at it as an opportunity every time an API comes out – how can we add this value to what we’re doing and put it into our platform?” – Tim Ormrod, Splash Access
Wi-Fi 6 is designed to support a modern world of hyper-connectivity. While exciting, this digital world will also see more challenges such as high client density, IoT everywhere, and more high-bandwidth requirements. This leads to increasing demands on the network, and organizations relying on connectivity more than ever before. One of the most important challenges a network faces is maintaining the relationship between the clients and the wireless network.
Many will agree that a great relationship is built on a strong foundation. For the wireless network, this foundation might be careful capacity planning and a proper site survey. But, even with a strong foundation, relationships between wireless clients and the network can hit rough patches. Without knowing the root-cause of the problem, it can be hard to improve that relationship.
Many wireless network engineers today spend at least a day every week troubleshooting Wi-Fi. This can be due to lack of visibility, increased network complexity, and human error. Time spent troubleshooting is a missed opportunity, as those countless hours could have been spent transitioning IT to meet modern organizational needs.
Visibility beyond wireless
This week, we are adding new capabilities and visibility to the Meraki dashboard to help simplify troubleshooting. Users can now pinpoint issues more quickly, and ensure excellent connectivity for clients. These updates are designed to not only provide insights about the health of Wi-Fi clients, but also to provide end-to-end visibility. Enhanced visibility will now allow for immediate identification of whether wireless is problematic, or if, for example, an upstream device is misconfigured.
Cisco research reveals that 63% of users blame the wireless network for problems, while the issue could be elsewhere. Now, network admins can gain insight and focus precious time on the actual root cause.
Once problematic clients or access points are identified, new snapshots are available to help quickly remedy the root cause. Users can now view wireless health metrics as they navigate through their dashboard. From an individual client’s page, a user can immediately assess the health of that specific client.
Below is an example of how to troubleshoot a troublesome wireless client with Meraki:
The end-to-end visibility snapshot, health snapshots for individual access points and clients, as well as updated event logs are all available today for Meraki Wireless users. These new metrics and capabilities, along with the centralized Wireless Health engine make the process of optimizing connectivity simple.
