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Application Visibility shows which applications guests actually use once they’re on the network. It surfaces traffic classification from the Cisco Service Gateway — distinguishing web browsing from video conferencing from streaming, for example — and lets you see how bandwidth is being spent. Typical uses:
  • Capacity planning — see which applications drive the most traffic and size uplinks accordingly.
  • Policy tuning — if a single class of traffic dominates, consider adjusting Access Policies or bandwidth controls at the network layer.
  • Abuse detection — unexpected long-running sessions for categories you don’t expect at a venue (peer-to-peer file sharing in an office, for example).
Application Visibility dashboard

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Requirements

  • Service Gateway deployment. Application Visibility reads its classification data from the Service Gateway’s deep-packet inspection. Meraki-only integrations do not produce this data.
  • Licensing on the Service Gateway. The underlying Cisco platform may require specific feature licenses to perform traffic classification. Coordinate with your Service Gateway provisioning.

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What it shows

Application Visibility dashboards typically show:
  • Top applications by volume over a configurable time window.
  • Category breakdowns — web, video, audio, cloud storage, social, etc.
  • Per-venue splits when combined with Site-based redirects or multi-site deployments.
  • Time-of-day patterns — when traffic peaks.
The exact visualisations depend on your Service Gateway version and configuration.

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What it doesn’t do

Application Visibility is observational, not enforcement:
  • It does not block applications. That’s a Service Gateway policy layer, configured separately.
  • It does not identify individual users — it aggregates traffic across active sessions.
  • It does not replace a SIEM or a dedicated traffic analytics tool for security investigations.
Think of it as situational awareness — a fast way to understand where bandwidth goes at a venue.

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Relationship to Statistics and Exports

The broader Statistics and Exports feature tracks who signed in. Application Visibility tracks what they did with the connection. The two complement each other.

Statistics and Exports

Login-level aggregates and reporting.

Cisco Service Gateway

The integration Application Visibility depends on.