Note: This tutorial is adapted from the ENNA course on Cisco U. If you find this helpful, consider taking the full course.

What You’ll Learn

• How to navigate the Cisco Meraki dashboard to monitor WAN Health, enhancing your network management skills
• How to analyze the performance and reliability of WAN connections using Meraki Insight
• How to interpret WAN link status and utilize advanced filtering options for in-depth analysis
• Insights into troubleshooting WAN issues with real-time data and historical performance metrics

What You’ll Need

• Access to the Cisco Meraki dashboard

Note: The lab environment is not available for this tutorial. However, the screenshots and steps are provided for your reference.

Gaining access to the Cisco Meraki dashboard is the first crucial step in managing and monitoring your network’s health. This topic guides you through the login process, laying the foundation for effective network management.

• Step 1: If you have access to a Meraki Dashboard, use your web browser to log in to the Meraki dashboard at https://dashboard.meraki.com.

• Step 2: Once you are logged in, make sure that you select the correct network in the top-left corner of the page. Click the drop-down arrow next to the current network and select the available PodN network, where “N” represents the number of the assigned pod.

This topic introduces you to navigating the dashboard to find the WAN Health feature, a critical tool for monitoring network performance. Understanding how to locate and use this feature is essential to maintaining optimal network operations.

• Step 1: In the menu on the left, navigate to Insight > Monitor > WAN Health.

• Step 2: Make sure that you are viewing the newer version of the GUI. In the top-right corner, you should see a link to the older user interface. Do not click it. In case you see a link in the top corner named View new version, click it.

Now that you’re in the WAN Health section, you’ll learn to interpret the health and status of your WAN links. This knowledge is crucial for diagnosing issues and helping ensure the reliability of your network.

• Step 1: View the current status of all WAN links in the overview widget at the top of the screen. In most cases, all the links will be displayed under the Online status.

• Step 2: View a more detailed status of individual WAN links in the main table. Notice both WAN links that belong to your assigned network.

• Step 3: Notice that by default, WAN link statuses and statistics are displayed for the last 2 hours. At the top of the page, click the drop-down menu to review statistics for the last day, last week, and last month. Pay attention to the Availability statistics. If you notice any outages indicated by the red color, hover your mouse over to display the details about the detected link outage.

In this final part, you’ll dive deeper into advanced WAN Health monitoring techniques, analyzing traffic, and using filters. This advanced knowledge enables you to fine-tune your network for optimal performance and reliability.

• Step 1: Identify the WAN interface with the highest amount of transferred traffic in the last month. Leverage table sorting by clicking the relevant column header to simplify the search.

• Step 2: Click the row with the ISP router network to further investigate. Make sure that you do not click directly on the ISP router name, because doing so will navigate you to the device summary instead.

• Step 3: View the top contributors to WAN link traffic. Analyze both clients and applications, which consume the most traffic.

• Step 4: At the top of the screen, switch the selected time range to Last day. Analyze the Usage, Loss, Latency, and Jitter graphs.

• Step 5: Click the WAN health button at the top of the page to navigate back to the main link overview table.

• Step 6: Closely examine the filtering options for the main table. Notice that under the Status drop-down menu, only four of the five options are selected; choose the Dormant option as well.

• Step 7: Notice additional columns displayed in the table. For example, you can now also see statistics for ISP Router WAN 2, which was by default hidden because it is not in use.

You’ve completed this tutorial, advancing in your learning journey. To continue building your networking skills, check out our additional tutorials, courses, and learning paths.

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Training Resources

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Finishing Up

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