Aruba Said the Right Words Regarding Dashboards

I wanna be a dashboard ranger
Live a life of guts and danger
I better stop before this song gets stranger…

Ah, dashboards. We got ’em these days, in quantity. We got so many freakin dashboards we need a dashboard to keep track of our dashboards when it comes to networking. But beyond dashboards, we got… AI.

That’s right- we got Artificial Intelligence, baby. And it’s teamed up with Dashboards, Inc. to make sure we have ALL KINDS OF STUFF to worry about. And maybe, if we’re lucky, some time those alerts will actually be actionable…

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m dashboard-jaded. I’ve seen many dashboards from market leaders that cost a fortune (they gotta make money, no fault there), that are fraught with Chicken-Little noise that is so overwhelming and uncorroborated by any other practical metric that they become one more Glass of Pain that gets ignored. Will AI help that? The answer will depend on how that AI is coded- like does the team behind the AI actually GET that endless petty alerts aren’t really a good thing?

Which brings us back to REAL intelligence… and Aruba Networks at Mobility Field Day 6. In particular, the presentation on what Aruba calls AIOPS– their version of system monitoring, root cause analysis, system adjustment, etc. This is something all the major vendors are doing these days, and all make sure that “AI” is sprinkled liberally in the marketing so you know that you are good to go. Unless you’re not, because the AI flags a bunch of stuff you don’t care about that takes you away from real work.

But Robin Jellum at Aruba said something profound in it’s simplicity as he presented on AIOPS… The exact wording escapes me, but Robin alluded to the fact that we all get bombarded with data. There’s no shortage of it in today’s network systems. But turning that data into MEANINGFUL alerts versus just lots of red and yellow dots to get lost in is the challenge, and Aruba recognizes that gratuitous, copious amounts of alerting on transient stuff does no one any good.

As a customer, I don’t want to buy ALERTS by the pound. I want to buy INFORMATION that comes from my data. It’s nice to hear Aruba recognize the difference. Time will tell if AIOPS can deliver.