ThousandEyes on Meraki MX

Optimizing Network and App Performance With ThousandEyes on Meraki MX

Today we're going to take a look at the new Meraki MX integration with ThousandEyes. I'm here in the Meraki dashboard. And if I go to Insight and then Active Application Monitoring, I'll see the new options. As part of this process, you can sign up for a new trial ThousandEyes account to test the integration. Let's click on Try It. You can either log into an existing ThousandEyes account and connect that, or create a new account from here. I'll use my existing account. 

Once you've entered your credentials, it will then connect that account to the Meraki dashboard here. You can see I chose my account group, and that's now connected. 

The next step is that we're going to be presented with some sample applications that we might like to monitor. These test templates make it really easy to get the monitoring packages up and running and provide some preconfigured content, such as tests, dashboards, and alerts, for key applications that you may want to monitor. 

And I'm going to select Salesforce here to have it create the tests automatically for me. You'll then give it your specific organization or subdomain name. And click Next. The next step is to select which networks we'd like to monitor. 

Now, you'll notice that we have networks here, not specific MX devices. And what's nice about this is you can provision the networks today, and also if you add MXs in the future, anything that belongs to that network will automatically have the agent deployed, so you can provision this ahead of time, and then once you set up the new Meraki devices, they'll automatically be added as monitoring targets. 

So I'll go ahead and select my two networks here. And that's all I have to do. You'll see it gives me a summary of which application I selected and also which network is going to enable the integration on. You can now click Start Monitoring to start the process. 

You'll see this will now take us over to the Active Application Monitoring status page. And our two networks have been activated. And also within the ThousandEyes UI, you'll see that those new agents have been added and are online. 

Now let's go take a look at that Salesforce test that it created for me when I selected the application during the onboarding workflow. You'll see I have my Salesforce test created. And if you look under Agents, it's automatically set to run against those two Meraki devices that we just deployed to. I can view the results of that test as well. 

And now you'll see a view of the test results using those two Meraki agents. If I hover over, you can see there they are. And if I go to my Table view, we can see the target URL that it tested and the response that it got back, a 200 successful. And then if we go look at our network test, we can also view the associated path visualization. 

You can see how easy it is to select the applications you want to monitor and then deploy the agents out to the Meraki devices and get tests running quickly and see the results.