Dashboard Email Alerts – Building the Dashboard

All Dashboard networks can be configured to generate email alerts for a variety of event types. These range from more generic, network-wide alerts, such as a configuration change or network usage/utilization alert, to more specific alerts, such as when a gateway access point becomes a repeater due to a loss in wired connectivity or whenever specific network clients connect or disconnect from the LAN. Alerting options are available for every Dashboard network from the Network-wide > Alerts page.

Each network type offers both generic, network-wide alerts and a set of alerts specific to network type. Each alert setting in each network can be set to use the default recipient list defined for that network or can be configured with a custom list of additional recipient emails to allow for tailored alerting across networks and devices. Certain alerts also have customizable triggers (i.e., scratching the surface of a machine learning foundation) available, allowing even further tailoring of alerts for specific sites or events.

For example, MR access points have the ability to generate email alerts and send them to a custom list of recipients when clients connected to a specified SSID experience a degraded signal quality, based on the selected SNR threshold, for more than the chosen amount of time. This type of alerting integrates the ability of the Meraki Dashboard not only to actively track and monitor client states on the network over time and use that information to intelligently alert when clients are receiving an unintended experience, but also to avoid potentially false alerts that could be triggered by brief outlying conditions.

An example of a more granular alert for MX security appliances is to alert whenever specified clients either connect or disconnect from the LAN of that network. In this case, the clients are selected from the entries of the Dashboard client list for that network and are configured to generate an alert whenever they begin responding to ARP requests from the MX or stop responding for more than 35 seconds.

While email alerts offer easy and powerful alerting abilities for any Dashboard network, the options discussed in the following sections offer even greater abilities to customize alert thresholds as well as integrate Dashboard alerting with other monitoring solutions to help take advantage of the power of the Meraki cloud with many existing monitoring solutions.

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