Analyst(s): Ron Westfall
Publication Date: October 3, 2024
HPE unveils the expansion of HPE Aruba Central Networking aimed at using AI insights to improve network management, security, performance, and visibility across the fast-growing HPE Aruba Networking Central Customer Base and Data Lake.
What is Covered in this Article:
- HPE Aruba Networking Central expands with new AI insights and capabilities
- New capabilities include integration of OpsRamp for third-party network device monitoring of industry players such as Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Palo Alto Networks
- HPE Aruba Networking Central also includes an improved network device configuration engine and expanded network observability
- Leverages AI-generated network optimizations, powered by AI insights from a rapidly growing customer base.
The News: Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced the expansion of HPE Aruba Networking Central, its security-first, AI-powered network management solution, with new AI insights and capabilities that include integration of OpsRamp, an HPE company, for third-party network device monitoring of industry vendors such as Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Palo Alto Networks.
HPE Smartens Aruba Networking Central with AI to Scintillate Hybrid Clouds
Analyst Take: HPE Is broadening the AI-driven insights capabilities of HPE Aruba Networking Central for networking and security to encompass products from a diverse array of industry players including Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, and Cisco. The new capabilities target providing purpose-built AI, contextual observability, architectural expandability, and improved configurability that can provide customers with a significant edge in controlling, predicting, and managing their networks.
OpsRamp enhances HPE Aruba Networking Central’s contextual network observability by integrating insights from various network devices, including wireless access points, switches, firewalls, and routers, spanning a wide array of vendors.
The move augments the HPE Aruba Networking Central network visibility and streamlined network device management proposition, alongside an expanded AI toolset, addressing the scale and demands of the most mission-critical environments. As such, the new OpsRamp option can help decrease heterogeneous network blind spots and accelerate common health monitoring and troubleshooting tasks.
New HPE Aruba Networking Central Capabilities Gain from HPE GreenLake OpsRamp XP
In my view, OpsRamp’s observability, monitoring, and remediation capabilities have already improved the HPE GreenLake hybrid and multi-cloud proposition and ecosystem influence as well as multi-vendor monitoring acumen. As a result, HPE GreenLake, and now HPE Aruba Central Networking, is better positioned to remove complexity resulting from the tool sprawl customers confront as they use on-premises toolsets in combination with cloud toolsets.
I find that the three main tenets of OpsRamp’s vision for autonomous IT operations, delivering efficiency, agility, and resilience for hybrid cloud operations, align with the topmost hybrid and multi-cloud monitoring priorities of organizations:
- Unified observability: OpsRamp delivers the ability to discover and monitor all the tools and technologies across a hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environment in one place. OpsRamp supports more than 2,500 integrations.
- AI-powered analytics: OpsRamp applies analytics across all the telemetry data, makes sense of the alert floods, correlates upstream and downstream alerts to pinpoint the root cause of incidents, and understand trends and identify anomalies.
- Intelligent automation: OpsRamp uses policy-based automation to prioritize response and automate resolution of several routine tasks, such as configuration management, event and incident management, patching, and more. It automates escalation of the incident to the correct expert to resolve, including integration with ITSM and collaboration tools.
Through comprehensive data collection and monitoring across hybrid environments, customers have increased the resiliency and performance of applications regardless of their deployment distribution and location. Today HPE GreenLake delivers a hybrid digital operations management platform that supports thousands of customers globally.
By integrating OpsRamp’s hybrid digital operations management solution with HPE Aruba Central, alongside integration into HPE GreenLake and the backing of HPE services, organizations gain a more compelling solution to reduce the operational complexity of multi-vendor and multi-cloud IT environments across their public cloud, collocations, and on-premises implementations.
HPE Aruba Networking Central’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) capabilities have also been expanded with the integration of HPE Aruba Networking User Experience Insight (UXI) monitoring natively into its interface. When combined with HPE Aruba Networking UXI sensors, this capability continuously monitors service level agreement (SLA) adherence from the user to the application from a unified pane of glass.
Customers can take advantage of the latest classification AI models, freshly trained and fine-tuned, which now leverage a data lake containing telemetry from over 4.6 million network-managed devices and more than 1.6 billion unique customer endpoints. This represents a significant exponential growth in 2024.
Moreover, HPE Aruba Networking previously expanded its AIOps network management capabilities by incorporating several GenAI Large Language Models (LLMs) into HPE Aruba Networking Central. Also, HPE unveiled new AI-driven security observability and monitoring features within HPE Aruba Networking Central to mitigate IoT security risks and launched behavioral analytics-based network detection and response capabilities.
The new capabilities strengthen the competitiveness of the HPE Aruba Networking Central solution and overall HPE Aruba portfolio against main rival Cisco including the Cisco Meraki portfolio. I find the move is especially well timed in assuring customers of the long-term strategic commitment to the HPE Aruba portfolio as HPE prepares to advance the integration of Juniper AI and wireless assets into its overall portfolio per the closing of the acquisition expected by late calendar year 2024 or early calendar year 2025.
Looking Forward
HPE’s latest announcement reflects a growing trend in the network management realm: availability of an improved network device configuration engine, expanded network observability, and AI-generated network optimizations, powered by AI insights from a rapidly growing customer base.
HPE Aruba Networking Central is a cloud-scale network management solution offered as a SaaS and is also included in the HPE GreenLake for Networking (NaaS) subscription, accessible through the HPE GreenLake platform.
HPE’s new AI Networking capabilities will enter public preview in October 2024. Before the end of the year, HPE will also include third-party monitoring, UXI integration, and select device configuration features in this preview.
Taken together, I believe the new HPE Aruba Networking Central solution is ready to deliver the expanded, purpose-built AI, intuitive contextual observability, architectural expandability, and streamlined, improved configurability key to establishing sharp competitive differentiation.
What to Watch:
- OpsRamp’s new operations copilot feature is a GenAI-based assistant that can enable enterprises to detect, predict, and remediate problems more quickly by converting machine data into a human-actionable and human-friendly format.
- OpsRamp has made significant investments in application workload observability, which is critical to understand how an application behaves in real time.
- With the introduction of full-stack network observability, OpsRamp has closed the visibility gap in network environments from the application to the edge.
See the complete HPE Aruba Networking Central announcement on the HPE website.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
HPE Infuses GenAI LLMs to Uplift HPE Aruba Networking Central AIOps
HPE Aruba Networking Ready to Turbocharge Private 5G
Black Hat 2024: HPE Aruba Networking Enlists AI to Fortify Cyber Defenses
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
