There’s nothing worse than getting a sales pitch on a product you’re genuinely interested and hearing that same old marketing phrase—single pane of glass. Because it’s usually not true! Let’s face it, as a network engineer you have many, many places you have to manage your network from. Depending on what you’re trying to do, or change and how big your network is, you may have multiple controllers just for a given service or geographical segment of your network.
Then, once you’re in that interface who knows where anything is? Sometimes you’re given a search bar, but is it ever any good at searching? Some vendors like to make sure you can get to something within so many clicks. That’s nice and all but this usually leads to the main menu being enormous and just as hard to find anything. An interface needs to be simple, clean and intuitive.
Aruba Central is just that. Simple. Even if you’ve never been in there before once you get in it’s so intuitive and easy to drive. Everything, all in one place wired, wireless, and even SD-WAN. It truly is a single pane of glass, for your network.
Not only can you manage all aspects of your network in Aruba Central, but you can do so much more. You can monitor the health, see status of all your devices, even security status of intrusion detection and prevention. You can also configure proactive alerts, run reports, and troubleshoot when problems do arise all right from Aruba Central. The reporting alone will make your next audit go so smoothly.
You can monitor your links at remote branch sites. Want to know if the MPLS link is still up or if it has failed over to your direct Internet access (DIA) connection at a site? That’s easy! You can customize the dashboard so you can see what you need to see, where you want to see it. The topological view provides a great and detailed graphical representation of your network so you can see exactly how devices are interconnected.
There’s also some truly powerful analytics built in as well. Check out this video on some of the cool things you can do with wireless analytics.
It’s called presence analytics and it can tell you so much about your network. Say, for example, you’re a retailer. Using presence analytics, you can see how many wireless devices go past your store, or how long people dwell or shop. You can see how many visitors take the time to jump on your in-store Wi-Fi network. Got multiple locations? You can compare these analytics store-to-store. Take your top performers and compare them to your bottom performers. Then take that powerful information to make some improvements at the bottom performers. Create some new marketing campaigns or some signage and see if it’s actually drawing in visitors. Extremely powerful stuff!
Go Deeper
If you want to learn more Aruba provides a lot of great options to get your hands-on Aruba Central. You can sign-up for a 90-day test drive. You can do a lot in 90 days!
Aruba has great community forum called Airheads so register and then head over to the “Controllerless Networks” forum. Here you can chat with Aruba Central users about their experiences and get some honest feedback from the real world.
And, the Aruba Central data sheet will give a you a solid introduction to Aruba Central.
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