Extend and Expand Your Cisco Meraki Dashboard Capabilities
Digital Transformation has drastically changed customer’s habits: they want to do business anytime, anywhere, and on their preferred device. In order to successfully engage these “always-connected” customers, organizations have to provide an ideal digital environment where everything can be arranged quickly and easily.
The Power Of Simplicity
Cisco has always worked to simplify powerful technology letting our users stay focused on their core business. As part of this vision, Cisco Meraki has built a cloud-based dashboard that customers around the world can use to easily manage their IT network infrastructure.
From the very beginning, our engineers have been focused on providing innovative features and extremely simple functionalities. In some cases, however, trying to address custom applications or specific use cases would have compromised the dashboard usability.
Why APIs make things different
The changing consumer experience is now made possible by exposing APIs which create extremely enticing possibilities and provide untold opportunities. Cisco is aware of how important it is to work closely with companies like Bizmate, in which the key strategy is to invest heavily in APIs allowing our partners and developers to build more specialized use cases.
VAPP – VIEW® Application Portal
In this background, Cisco and Bizmate have worked together to provide a new application portal specially designed for Cisco users adding value to the Cisco Meraki platform and building digital solutions for customers and partners.
VAPP provides pre-built web applications in a cloud computing environment with normalized authentication, APIs integration, event-driven workflows, rule-based actions and so much more.
VAPP easily integrates with the Cisco Meraki infrastructure and processes data, thanks to the vast extended library of available connectors in VIEW® – Real Time Intelligence. This innovative architecture, based on non-relational databases and inference engines, delivers a large amount of streaming data flow in order to help decision-making through precise and timely information on the status of the processes and assets involved.
VAPP Interactive Dashboards summarize the information available in a single view with immediate impact, and allows the user to extend and expand the Cisco Meraki dashboard capabilities. These Dashboards facilitate parameter tracking and indexes of interest through a dynamic and easily customizable comprehensive set of Apps to interact with data from Cisco Meraki network.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the best VAPP apps.
Concentration Map
Get insights on your user’s concentration and movements by analyzing their behaviors with the help of interactive maps. Concentration Map provides more comprehensive connections between data and location to help you understand data at finer detail. By bringing real-world context to your analysis, maps are unique in their ability to help to generate insights and make predictions that would not be possible using traditional tables and charts.
- Improving customer experience or targeted marketing.
Combine geospatial location, ease of access, context and proximity to make relevant marketing offers or improve experiences. This enables marketers to proactively meet customer needs. - Improving safety.
Whether it’s responding to emergency situations, offering services to employee or improving procedures, all organizations are candidates for location analytics based on this app. - Optimizing business processes.
Adding the location context of assets – manufacturing, assembling, logistics, distribution and servicing – helps optimize businesses process and adds value for organizations.
Configuration Backup
This App can backup and restore your Cisco Meraki Network configuration. Creating configuration backups enables you to later restore a configuration.
This is useful when you want to revert the equipment settings to an earlier configuration. You can perform the restoration as a single operation instead of manually reconfiguring each setting in the current configuration. You can either save backups on the server or export backups to an external host.
- Save time and effort with network backups.
Launch an instant and reliable backup for your Wi-Fi, VPN, and firewalls configuration. - Store configuration data centrally.
Organize configuration backups to enable quick and easy searches. Search for and locate a configuration file to restore. - Quickly recover from device or configuration failures.
Reduce downtime by easily replacing a device configuration from the archives. Quickly recover from failed configuration changes by restoring a previous known good configuration. - Get alerts on errors.
Monitor for failed backup, and execute corrective actions as required.
Wi-Fi Coverage Survey
Wi-Fi Coverage Survey is a complete Wi-Fi site surveying app. Site surveys are performed in real-time producing more informative views of your wireless coverage.
Wi-Fi Coverage Survey App automatically supports network architects and engineers to define the areas over which signal levels need improvements. You won’t need to move around and collect Wi-Fi data of the entire area, the data will be automatically collected by VAPP which measures wireless signal in real-time and with actual data provided by your network users.
- Automatically monitor your Wi-Fi Infrastructure.
Analyze the coverage and the correct propagation of your Wi-Fi network signal to improve its performance. - Dynamic Heatmaps.
Wi-Fi Coverage Survey heatmaps allows to perform Wi-Fi site survey easier and faster. It works by defining locations (maps, buildings) in specific geographic areas. - Data Storage & Comparisons.
By performing Wi-Fi measurements, this App stores details of device location, signal level and other relevant data. You can compare coverages over different days and understand which conditions caused the change.
The examples above are just a few of the applications available on the VAPP marketplace. They represent a smarter approach to IT management and network data analysis based on data collected from Cisco devices.
VAPP gives you end-to-end visibility across your business processes allowing you to effectively monitor your assets, proactively address issues and provide the level of service expected by your customers. Thanks to Cisco APIs, VAPP enterprise-ready applications tie the right metrics together into real-time dashboards that help you focus on things that matter on your business.
Francesco Boscarino
CTO, Bizmate Srl
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