Accessible by navigating to the Insight > Web Application Health page on the Dashboard, Web Application Health is designed to monitor the performance of defined web-based applications or traffic. This traffic is passively monitored on a per-flow basis, with the related traffic metadata securely uploaded and analyzed in the Meraki cloud to determine if any detected performance issues are introduced within the local network, WAN, or even at the application level. This monitoring process is designed around the use of deep packet inspection, similar to Meraki’s AMP and IDS/IPS solutions, to gather information at both the application and network layer to provide valuable performance insights.
Figure 5-15 shows several tracked web applications and their current status overviews. For each tracked web application, the Dashboard is able to provide a report regarding recent application performance as well as generate alerts based on defined performance thresholds. These performance thresholds can use Meraki’s default values for any predefined applications, manually configured for each application, or configured to use Smart Thresholds. Smart Thresholds allow for enhanced monitoring by observing typical traffic patterns and tailoring each application performance threshold based on real-world observed performance. This allows for performance thresholds to be fine-tuned based on the real-world performance of each application within each deployment, providing more accurate alerts by automatically determining typical performance thresholds and generating alerts only when true anomalous behavior is observed for that application at a given location.