There’s a lot of work that goes into identifying the right NMS. To simplify the process, we’ve brought the top vendor solutions into a controlled lab environment and put them through the paces.* See why HPE Aruba Networking Central, with its recent advancements, should be at the top of your list when considering NMS solutions.
Agility
We highlighted the most common customer complaints and baselined network platform response times. We also benchmarked client and device connectivity (wired and wireless) and simulated common issues like incorrect credentials, depleted DHCP scopes, and intermittent DNS connectivity. We also tested typical UI/UX workflows, such as identifying top consumers of network traffic.
HPE Aruba Networking Central has major architectural changes resulting in faster load times. Our results showed that it delivers real-time status updates for client and device reachability, with dashboard responses and UI/UX performance two times faster than our classic version. Additionally, log updates with alert/insights-based incident detection made troubleshooting up to six times faster compared to the closest competition.*
Intuitiveness
The revamped Network Operations Center (NOC) view includes rich contextual icons, embedded graphs, and expandable widgets for an easy and intuitive dashboard for an administrator to start their day. The innovative solar system view provides site-level drill downs for more details and keeps the context consistent without wasting real estate. Having information in one place gives admins broad, multi-dimensional site visibility to understand network issues and potential resolutions.
Time travel sits at the top of the dashboard, allowing admins to rewind data like a DVR, for up to 7 days, showcasing minute-by-minute resolution.
HPE Aruba Networking Central can pinpoint issues by identifying network activity during a selected window of time, and to view statistics of affected clients, devices and topology. In contrast, other solutions may require manual time adjustments, which can make troubleshooting harder.
Visibility
In addition to identifying three times more applications than the closest competitor*, HPE Aruba Networking Central also offers web categorization. It provides deep visibility into web applications with enhanced security features such as destination country, TLS certificate, firewall status and security risk assessment.
The composite health score can also capture latency using intuitive visualization. Application analytics can be viewed by clients on a minute-by-minute basis using time travel, and network admins can easily identify the top consumers of any application on the network. This makes it simple for them to pinpoint issues by use case, such as a student using torrents to download movies on the school network, and is a workflow that most competitors do not offer.
Unification
The Client Insights feature converges security and networking, offering client fingerprinting and classification using AI/ML. This feature also identifies networking constructs such as VLAN, SSIDs and roles, making it simple to find anomalous behavior and police endpoints. Other solutions may require a mix of products to achieve the same objective.
Building on classic HPE Aruba Networking Central, it can automatically tag endpoints and perform behavior analysis, and introduces intuitive, functional views for deeper insights. Admins can analyze destination traffic such as “Is the IoT clock going to a server in Russia?” or “Is it trying to bombard the AAA server in the network?” While the data is fully customizable, built-in Client Insights is optimized to address key use cases and provide policy recommendations for IoT devices, helping admins transition to a Zero Trust networking model.
Insights
HPE Aruba Networking Central can distinguish between alerts (as the reactive answer to issues), and insights (as the proactive answer for network optimization.) It makes a clear distinction by enhancing alerts and insights with AI/ML features, providing a comprehensive solution to network issues and offering a wide range of alerts to cover many use cases while remaining customizable. Additionally, some cloud NMS vendors hide device CPU and memory statistics, but in this new version, for example, an admin can set a moderate severity alert when CPU crosses a 70% threshold.
The new alert framework facilitates the creation of innovative alerts, even on unlisted Key Performance Indicators. Root cause and recommendations are now tied into alerts making them more granular and tailored. Automated troubleshooting steps are triggered whenever an alert is issued providing faster resolution.
Insights offer optimizations that significantly enhance network performance, proactively avoiding potential problems. Peer baselining remains a cornerstone of the new insight engine. It addresses different use case categories, providing both valuable insights and closed-loop configuration recommendations, which can differ from other solutions that focus on a single category while neglecting others, impacting coverage.
Summary
Packed with numerous features and advanced functionality, HPE Aruba Networking Central is continually updated to incorporate the latest innovations. If you’re currently evaluating an NMS, let us show you how the new version enhances the operator experience. If you are a classic HPE Aruba Networking Central customer, the latest version is easily accessible using a toggle switch at the top of your dashboard. Don't miss out on these amazing updates. For more information, contact us.
* Benchmarking and tests done with equivalent networking products in a controlled environment. HPE Labs, Sunnyvale, California, August – September 2024.
Additional resources:
Raising the bar on network observability and AI
Introducing the next generation of HPE Aruba Networking Central
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/aruba-central.html
Vishal_Mann
Vishal Mann works on the HPE Technical Enablement Team helping customers use HPE Aruba Networking Central to solve their use cases with AIOps.
