Posts Tagged ‘topology’

Our Topology Icons Speak Volumes

Communicating technical topics to a broad audience can be challenging. Photos, illustrations, and video are all helpful tools designed to simplify complex subjects, but it’s easy to go overboard when describing a product as intricate as a switch or security appliance.

To help everyone represent Cisco Meraki products and related concepts more clearly, Meraki has released a set of official topology icons (in png and svg formats) to encourage collaboration and discussion.

Speaking a single language

The icons help to describe key networking ideas more consistently across our entire product line. The products covered include our switches, access points, smart cameras, security and SD-WAN devices, virtual appliances, and other generic networking items. The images can be used freely, with attribution, as a part of the Creative Commons terms of use. We envision the icons being used in topology diagrams for deployment documents, blogs, forums, and social media.

Below is a symbol legend for some select icons you will find inside our larger icon set in the Meraki Library.

Topology Set Icons

Left-to-Right Arrows for Layer 2 – The two sets of arrows going right and left indicate communication between devices at Layer 2. Available on MS device icons. Example:

Diagonal Arrows for Layer 3 – Our Layer 3 icon adds diagonal arrows to indicate the routing capabilities available on MS and MX products. Example:

Wireless – The icon represents a device that has Wi-Fi capabilities. Available on MR wireless, select MX security appliances, and Z-Series teleworker appliances. Example:

MX SD-WAN and security specific symbols – The MX icon includes symbols for inspecting traffic (magnifying glass), diagonal arrows for routing, and a brick wall for protection against bad actors. Example:

Dotted Line for Virtual Appliances – The virtual appliance provides Meraki security and SD-WAN services for migrating IT services to Amazon Web Services and or Microsoft Azure. Example:

Server – The server icon has several sub-icons to highlight important characteristics. Available with cloud, directory, domain, file, web, and Meraki servers. Example:

If you would like to get started, consider downloading our full icon set to begin incorporating the images into your topology maps, Meraki community messages, personal blogs, and Twitter posts.

Meraki Topology Icons by Cisco Meraki are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Topology has Leveled Up

The ability to see inside your network just got easier. We have recently added Layer 3 visibility to the Meraki dashboard to create our L3 Topology View. We designed the view to dramatically increase the level of transparency into your deployment and to help network admins visually organize their network connections.

header L3

Previously, Meraki’s topology feature detailed how devices were physically connected. With the new view, you can now toggle the graph to also see how the network is logically connected using interfaces and subnets.

L3 Zoom

Nodes with interfaces on the same subnet will have lines drawn between them and are annotated with the subnet address for quick referencing. Hovering over a node with your cursor displays both the local interface addresses and routes.

Layer 3 VLAN

Comment on our Community Page
Let us know how you like the changes to the topology view inside the Meraki Community! We are always looking for new ideas on how to improve the dashboard.

To gain access to a beta release of the L3 Topology View, please contact Meraki Support.

 

 

 

Visio Stencils Now Available

Experienced networking professionals would agree that the more clearly documented a network architecture is, the easier it is to manage. As such, Visio’s diagramming tools have become widely used by those in the industry to visually map out a network’s components and connections.

We’re happy to announce that Visio stencils are now available for all Cisco Meraki hardware: our access points, switches, and security appliances.  

Visio Diagram

These stencils will make the diagramming process that much easier for our users, enabling them to make their Visio diagrams more straightforward and more flexible (with the help of predefined connection points that make it simple to create or edit links between devices).

Simple Topology

Of course it’s worth noting that for those with the full Meraki stack, the dashboard’s auto-populating topology tool should prove even faster and easier than Visio. It allows more functionality too, with hover-over hyperlinks taking you directly to the security appliance, switch, AP, or port page for at-a-glance monitoring and troubleshooting.  Until then you can download the Visio stencils here.