Imagine Sherlock Holmes solving a case without his sharp observational skills — he’d be lost in a maze of clues, missing vital details. Similarly, IT teams navigating today’s complex networks need more than just basic device, end point and configuration telemetry; they want real-time visibility into application performance to uncover hidden issues and optimize operations. In our recent announcement of the public preview of HPE Aruba Networking Central, we've added application visibility to our suite of features, designed to enhance your network management experience.
Imagine if a vital communication tool like Teams or Zoom has slow response times during a crucial board meeting. Pinpointing the problem without visibility can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Is the issue with the application, network congestion, or something else entirely? Application visibility helps quickly identify and address issues, ensuring business-critical applications receive the necessary bandwidth, maintaining security compliance for SaaS applications, and providing CIOs with clear insights into SaaS adoption. It transforms network management from a reactive to a proactive approach, allowing IT professionals to address issues swiftly and maintain a seamless user experience.
Leveraging edge-based DPI
To provide pervasive application visibility, HPE Aruba Networking devices — such as CX switches, access points, and gateways — play a crucial role, thanks to their advanced Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine, which enables Layer 7 application control on access ports. Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure highlights: “Aruba has delivered two key features that separate its switching hardware from competitors: in-service software upgrades (ISSUs) for switch stacks, and Layer 7 application control on access ports.”1 This capability enables rich, real-time insights into every data packet, enhancing our application visibility and policy control.
The DPI engine provides detailed visibility from layer 4 to layer 7, allowing you to efficiently troubleshoot issues like slow file transfers and manage bandwidth for critical applications. By offering comprehensive control and policy enforcement right at the network’s edge, this technology supports our end-to-end security-first approach, ensuring that your network remains both high-performing and secure.
Synthesizing DPI telemetry into actionable insights
Wondering how to leverage DPI application telemetry more effectively? New HPE Aruba Networking Central now offers deeper network application intelligence that goes far beyond prior releases and competing products. HPE Aruba Networking Central’s application visibility screens now utilize extensive application telemetry from our CX switches, access points, and gateways to identify and categorize over 4950+ applications across more than 30 categories. It also enhances Web Content Classification by integrating Brightcloud, which classifies over 43 billion URLs and 1 billion domains with an impressively low false positive rate of under 0.2%. This includes classifying websites into over 80 categories, including emerging fields like Generative AI (nearly 1500 Gen AI applications — see image below).
You can see which applications are allowed or blocked, their types (public, private, and hybrid), usage patterns, security risks, roles, TLS visibility, and their origins by country. Additionally, you can easily identify anomalous behavior by drilling down into which user categories (corporate employee, contractor, guest etc.) have accessed specific applications, the type of endpoints (such as IoT and corporate devices) that accessed them, and the devices through which users accessed the applications (e.g.,a user trying to access Workday using his laptop or mobile phone). This comprehensive telemetry feeds into Client Insights, providing advanced profiling of both wired and wireless endpoints and behavior analytics for IoT devices. New HPE Aruba Networking Central also correlates application performance with RF statistics, allowing network administrators to quickly identify the root causes of performance issues, such as clients on the 2.4 GHz band, high channel utilization, RF retries or drops, and poor signal strength. All of these metrics are easily displayed in the new application dashboard.
Detailed application performance view
Application dashboard
How we stack up
Unlike some other NMS solutions that provide limited visibility into a smaller selection of apps, our new HPE Aruba Networking Central covers a wide field. Our DPI engine is like having a super-powered zoom lens, providing detail and clarity into network traffic.
Transform your experience: Elevate your network observability with HPE Aruba Networking
With our application visibility leveraging the robust DPI engine in HPE Aruba Networking devices, you’re not just managing your network — you’re mastering it. New HPE Aruba Networking Central offers intuitive network observability with app insights, helping make every application run smoothly and issues resolved quickly, so you don’t have to worry about the details. While HPE Aruba Networking Central handles the network complexities, you can focus on strategic business initiatives.
