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Aruba Wireless

Will this work with Aruba wireless access points?

  • Yes... at least with AOS6x and the 7xxx series of controllers as described here: Wireless OIDs polled in NPM - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

    (this I have working today)

  • Hi RichardLetts

    You have mentioned that currently you are using Solarwinds for monitoring the Aruba Wireless devices...

    Is it possible for you to share more details like what all can be achieved? Does it cover basic monitoring and how much do we miss out when compare to Airwave?

    I have been tasked to provide details about how much can be monitored for Aruba Gear from Solarwinds.. this would be on APs, IAPs, Mobility Controllers...

    If you fine to share then i can ping you separately for this...

  • We have: 32 controllers ( mixture of 7005, 7210, 7220, and 7440) and ~13,000 wireless access points across three campuses, three hospitals and dozens of clinics.

    We have a /15 of IPv4 RFC1918 address space allocated for the clients, and we easily reach 75,000 unique clients at a peak.

    Our Wireless install is so large that we have three instances of airwave running to monitor it.

    IMHO There is such a huge difference in functionality between the two that it's hard to know where to begin.

    I only monitor the wireless infrastructure to get a single pane of glass for alerting.

    The statistics collected in Solarwinds are not worth the storage, and I'd like to be able to turn them off.

    Solarwinds does not

    a) allow any management of the individual thinAP

    pastedImage_3.png

    Mac Address? Serial#? Model #? co-channel interference?

    [NPM is not even close to what you get from airwave at this level]

    note, this particular AP really has connections to TWO controllers simultaneously, but NPM treats that as two separate AP.

    b) deal with thinAP configured in any of failover or redundant links; we have not gone to AOS8 yet, so I have no idea how it will do with clustered controllers, but badly would be my assumption.

    The consequences of this cannot be underestimated. the out of the box thinAP down alerts have to take into consideration the AP status across two controllers.

    if AP are not registered with a controller they may be considered disappeared (and they get removed)

    Upgrading controllers causes APS to go down on that controller, and if they don't re-register in time they get disappeared. There is a setting to prevent this, but it gets reverted on every NPM upgrade.

    the maximum thinAPID we have is: 15,871,061 [yep, 15 million] now we may be large, but I do not think we have replaced every AP more than 10,000 times.

    c) the endpoint tracking is weak in comparison. this is my phone:

    pastedImage_0.png

    I cycled through campus at the weekend (example of metadata analysis because I this device moved 0.8 miles between the buildings in under 12 minutes). The gap in the analysis is when you reach buildings that I had been in before and after my ride or if I was fast-roaming (important for maintaining wifi calling): Did I go past the Tower (UWTT) or past the New Burke Museum (NBM) ? what happened to the other Access points I went past?

    Aruba Clarity does even more in-depth predictive analytics on the wireless experience than this...

    Richard

  • RichardLetts

    Thanks for sharing in-depth details... I am not much of a Aruba guy but have understood few things when i interact with the team who manages this..

    Even for us the reason to try Aruba Gear monitoring from Solarwinds is becoz of 'Single Pane of Glass'.. I did go thru multiple posts here and got to know that there is a lot of gap between the two and since I saw your post mentioning explicitly about monitoring, i wanted to get your view and experience...

    There is a trap option as well but again that will not meet the goal and i cannot get that into dashboard and moreover doing trap-based alerting is a pain...

    Yes i did notice about the APs getting disappeared and the only workaround is that graphic change which again goes away after the upgrades...

    So are you still monitoring some bits of Aruba from Solarwinds?