With multiple appliances and multiple locations, I imagine this would be a life saver. With only one appliance, this was a convenience. The nice part of the dashboard is that you can access it anywhere, make a configuration change, and in a couple minutes the setting will be synced down to the device. There are also event logs per client so you can monitor the content filtering and other rules that have taken effect.

The features include content filtering (including malware, adware, phishing, and other general categories), traffic shaping, a security filter which has already blocked some exploits, and more dashboard elements like the top clients by usage, top applications by bandwidth. I have obtained a much better idea of the network traffic than the old SonicWall could provide. The dashboard on Meraki is a very nice interface. This will access the local interface of the firewall and will work without Internet access. If you need to assign a static IP address, plug a computer into the firewall and go to. While I have a DHCP internal network, the ISP-provided IP address is static and must be configured. I ran into a problem here in that it assumes a DHCP network. Then, once you plug everything in, it will auto-download the configuration from this global dashboard and the settings will be as you configured them. It essentially tells you to create your account with Meraki, claim the device, and configure the network settings. Besides the hardware, the trial was accompanied by a quick start guide.

Meraki firewall