Cisco Meraki VS The Dude

Interestingly - I work in IT - I’d be very surprised if Cisco didn’t put up a fight to another company using the same name - https://meraki.cisco.com - unlike the mlms products, ciscos is actually pretty good, if a little pricey. Source: over 1 year ago

Cisco - https://meraki.cisco.com/ - https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/small-business/networking/routers.html - https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/small-business.html. Source: over 1 year ago

Forgive me that this is exact opposite of their wishes to manage it locally. Meraki is cloud-based admin panel, but man, it's easy to take care of. It has its critics, naturally, usually by comparing it to Palo Alto or Fortinet. But those require real expertise to manage, that takes time and lots of training. Yet it's light years better than Ubiquiti. If they can handle the price, it's quite nice. Source: over 1 year ago

Meraki is a popular brand name - will that cause any problems? https://meraki.cisco.com/ I wonder if you would need to change it. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw your title. Source: about 2 years ago

Network & Telephony - These are some other areas you'll probably have to wrangle at some point. Depending on your budget, skills, and time, Meraki might be the best "Easy button" for your network needs -- a top to bottom Meraki network (Firewall, Switches, APs) will make for very easy management, but it doesn't come super cheap either. If you're looking for something more affordable, but still intuitive,... Source: about 2 years ago

An incredibly powerful free tool that has been around a long time is Mikrotik's 'The Dude'. Source: about 1 year ago

If you have a powerful enough router in the network, one of your options is to use The DUDE (Documentation). Note that DUDE requires IP access to WinBox from the management network. For some more features, you should also enable SNMP on your routers. DUDE server can also host a syslog server, so you can have centralized log ingestion. The downside of this solution is that it's unfortunately not a fully-featured... Source: over 1 year ago

“The Dude” is what the tool is called (yeah I don’t know why they called it that either). It’s a client-server application and the server nowadays only runs on a Mikrotik router as a separate package. You could use any Mikrotik router but since it’s heavy on logging I use a Mikrotik CHR as a VM just to host the dude. The free CHR license gives you 1Mbps throughput which for SNMP monitoring is plenty. Source: about 2 years ago

MikroTik has a software called The Dude, that runs on some sort of computer acting as a server (an always on computer to receive, monitor, and store the data collected from the statistics). This would be the best way to achieve what you want to do (collecting user usage statistics and storing it in one place). Source: about 2 years ago

Https://mikrotik.com/thedude Supports SNMP, ICMP, DNS and TCP monitoring for devices that support it. Source: about 2 years ago