HPE Aruba boosts observability, third-party management capabilities

HPE Aruba is expanding the capabilities of Networking Central, its cloud-based management platform for administering and managing all aspects of an Aruba wired and wireless customer infrastructure. Among the upgrades are an improved network device configuration engine, expanded network observability features, and a broader menu of AI-generated, network trained and tuned optimization models.

To ease the often tedious job of network and device configuration, the device management package in HPE Aruba Networking Central now includes a common configuration model that simplifies Aruba’s wired, wireless, and gateway configuration tasks by letting customers build tools with Python, Ansible, or Terraform, according to Alan Ni, senior director of edge marketing for HPE Aruba. It also includes a menu of more than 90 new APIs customers can organize from a single console, Ni said.

“We support tons of different network components, from switches and routers to IoT devices, and that requires customers to configure each family of devices separately, which means three different APIs to write to and three different pushes to update and provision those device classes across the network,” Ni said. “Now we’ve collapsed that down [so users can update] those devices from a single API. And now, from a single push, we can provision everything, which reduces configuration errors and eases management of different device types across the enterprise.” 

In the observability arena, Aruba has expanded Networking Central so that it can see beyond the Aruba-based networking world and gain visibility into third-party network equipment from Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto and other vendors.

The technology that enables this service came from HPE’s 2023 acquisition of IT operations management vendor OpsRamp, which specializes in monitoring, automating and managing IT infrastructure, cloud resources, workloads and applications for hybrid and multicloud environments.

Within the native Networking Central interface, users can now monitor elements that they couldn’t before, such as third-party switches, access points, firewalls, and routers, Ni said. “Basically, we are removing any blind spots that customers had when it comes to managing and troubleshooting heterogeneous networks,” Ni said.

In addition, Networking Central now includes support for Aruba’s digital experience monitoring (DEM) capabilities, which will allow users to continuously monitor service level agreement (SLA) adherence from a single pane of glass, Ni said.

In addition, Ni said Networking Central’s AI-based support has been enhanced with three times as many trained models as it had six months ago. 

“We have seen exponential growth and now have a data lake that features telemetry from more than 4.6 million network-managed devices and more than 1.6 billion unique customer endpoints,” Ni said. “Ultimately, this increased detail can help customers significantly reduce the time and effort to plan, deploy, manage, troubleshoot and optimize networks.”

HPE Aruba customers will have access to the new capabilities through a public preview starting in October.

Building on recent upgrades

HPE Aruba has added a number of AI-based features to its Networking Central platform over the past year.

In May, the vendor announced plans to build new AI-powered security observability and monitoring features into Networking Central to help customers protect both AI-based and traditional resources from IoT security risks. 

A month prior, HPE Aruba added genAI-driven search tools to its management platform to help customers access detailed responses to queries about network configurations, documentation, and other IT operational issues.