Meraki SD-WAN Woes

Background:

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We have been on Meraki SD-WAN for about two years now; the network team didn't get a lot of say in it. The director and architect that forced it upon us are no longer with the company. We use their most powerful appliances, the MX450s as one-armed concentrators in our DCs. We utilize traditional Cisco infrastructure inside of our datacenters, Meraki is just for the autoVPN to our remote sites. We don't split tunnel so all traffic comes back to the DCs. We have about 300 remote sites with dual VPN tunnels back to each DC. Deployments, ease of use, uptime and hardware reliability have been great. Features, code and changes are inconsistent. Important data/reports is not available. They have this error checking feature half implemented that is slowly turning our network into a series of interconnected bricks. There have been frustrations, and we came close to a deal breaker late last year (20% packet loss around 9am on all VPN tunnels almost every day for a few weeks), but we are making progress and using their API to fill in some gaps and automate stuff.

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This week:

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Well now we have another bug, this one is on our most important head-end. This error is preventing us from making any changes to the device. We have an open ticket going back to 2019 on this and everytime we escalated Meraki said the developers are investigating this. At the time we didn't realize the bug affected the entire device. Well it's almost nine months later and they're still looking at it. Except now I need to make a change to the head-end, and we are holding back multiple projects. If something happened and we NEEDED to execute any type of change on it we couldn't because of their error-checking. Spoiler alert: Meraki doesn't know where the error is coming from either.

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I opened a new ticket on this and Meraki immediately closed it without any communication at all. "The developers know about it" says Meraki. If I open a ticket saying I cannot make changes to my production network, responding "we know" and shutting the door is pretty poor service even for Cisco.

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I don't know what to say, this problem is well over my head now. I have been trying to defend Meraki and SD-WAN as a whole. I'm still of using SDN tech for the right situations, but Meraki has a long way to go before I could recommend them for SD-WAN.