HPE Aruba Central Gets AI Boost As Third-Party Network Monitoring Unlocked

HPE Aruba Networking Central will be able to extend monitoring beyond HPE Aruba-based networks with views into Cisco, Palo Alto and Juniper networks, among others, across the entire networking stack. It's a feat that's a first for the networking industry, according to HPE Aruba.

HPE Aruba Networking's flagship network management platform is being injected with more AI capabilities that will allow third-party monitoring of customer networks, including networks equipped with competitor gear from the likes Cisco Systems and Palo Alto Networks.

To make it happen, HPE Aruba Networking Central is being integrated with technology from OpsRamp, which HPE acquired in 2023, for expanded observability. The soon-to-be released latest edition of the platform is also gaining new visibility and experience monitoring features, Alan Ni, senior director of edge marketing for HPE Aruba, told CRN.

"With this new version, we really doubled down, or I'd say, tripled down, on the amount of AI that we're putting into the product, and it's now focused around things like automation of configuration, etc. We've also expanded the ability to not just be able to monitor and manage Aruba devices but provide monitoring capability for leading third-party manufacturers in networking," Ni said.

OpsRamp technology, now natively integrated into the Central platform, will provide more context and networking insights with the addition of views into network devices such as wireless access points, switches, firewalls, and routers across a range of vendors, according to HPE Aruba.

Third-party monitoring across the full networking stack is a feat that HPE Aruba is very proud to reveal, Ni said.

"This is not just third-party wireless access points or switches, but these could be routers, firewalls, [or] things that sit within the network real estate and it's super important because we recognize a lot of our customers have heterogeneous environments," he said. "This was a blind spot when we were looking at the user experience and trying to measure user experience or troubleshoot."

Up until now, HPE Aruba could monitor only third-party access points and switches via its AirWave technology, which was not part of the cloud-based Central platform.

"We're demonstrating our innovation and the ability to respond to customer demand and be able to do it at cloud scale," Ni said.

Jasper, Indiana-based HPE Aruba partner PIER Group is no stranger to managing large university campuses with hundreds of thousands of access points, switches, users and devices. Having OpsRamp technology built into the Central platform is "huge," according to Shannon Champion, vice president of solutions architecture for HPE Aruba partner Pier Group.

"No one has one vendor, period. That doesn't scale. But with the technology the way it is, there's no reason why I can't have a single configuration across multiple product generations and vendors in the long run, which is a huge resource savings," he said.

Without it, network configuration and management become "very complicated, very quick," Champion said.

"This [addition] has been a long time coming," he added.

Expanded AI Networking

HPE Aruba's data lake has expanded significantly in the last six months, adding to the company's AI prowess, Ni said. The platform has three times more AI-powered recommendations for network optimization since March 2024.

As of March 2024, HPE Aruba had four million network devices under management with Central and one billion unique endpoints served by those 4 million devices. The company six months later now has 4.7 network devices and 1.6 billion endpoints respectively, Ni said.

"That's really eye-opening growth numbers for us, and not just growth in terms of sheer numbers, but increasing the amount of telemetry that our data lakes have," he said. "It's not just the data science that's applied, but it's also the breadth in the scale of the data lake. And this growth really does give us a huge key advantage here.”

HPE Aruba Networking Central’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) capabilities have also been expanded. HPE Aruba Networking User Experience Insight (UXI) monitoring, which HPE Aruba brought in via its acquisition of Cape Networks in 20218, has been integrated into Central's interface, enabling continuously monitor service level agreement (SLA) adherence from user to the application from a single pane of glass.

To simplify network configurations at scale, HPE Aruba Networking Central’s device management will now include a common configuration model across HPE Aruba Networking wired, wireless, and gateway products, new hierarchical configurations capabilities, and 90 new APIs, according to the company.

"With this new version of Central … it's really focused around increasing the amount of AI insights that we're driving, third-party monitoring, revised configuration and finally, really expanding on the digital experience that we're providing to our end users," Ni said. "We're expanding what our definition is of AI networking."

The updates to HPE Aruba Networking Central will be going into public preview for partners and end customers on October 1, the company said.

HPE Aruba Networking in March announced the expansion of its AIOps network management capabilities by integrating its own GenAI Large Language Models (LLMs) inside HPE Aruba Networking Central.