Wireless Access

I have an airwave 7.6.2 installation that uses monitor only mode and all of the configuration mismatches sems to be a pain. Has anyone disabled the auditing to work around this situation? Pro's con's? General opinions or other options?

I agree with your comment, and tyically disable auditing on the group during my deployments.  Sometimes customers want it other times they don't mind seeing the mismatch (they hide the link and the columns where necessary).   I think it is just easier to disable the auditing.  For a monitored only deployment, I am not aware of anything really lost.

Im agree also... i prefer disabling it when its just on monitor only...

I don't see any issue with disabling this feature unless you plan to go to a controlled Airwave solution in the near future.

My Aruba-Partner recommended disabling auditing, but I'd like to comment of the value of it (so I will):

After the pain of getting all configs imported, templated built (for iAP) and the mismatches down to zero, I now have a very powerful tool to tell me when something in my configurations has changed.

Those changes might be intentional - fixing/changing something to make the users' life better, or...

Those changes might be un-intentional - upgraded software and now folks are unhappy.

Airwave will show exactly what has changed (ever forgotten what all you changed or didn't change during a troubleshooting session with TAC?) and can give before/after snapshots.

Makes it really easy to document the change and to roll it back if you have to.

Now that I'm caught up with the mismatches, staying caught up isn't all that much work, and the auditing has saved my bacon more than once.

A word of caution: when you disable auditing in a group, for some changes that require APs to update, if the auditing was disable, APs would not update accordingly and it will not show the heatmap, the radio status for that AP shows “disable”. 

Pros to keeping up with mismatches:

1 - The jump to managing your network from AMP isn't too far off

2 - Once you've spent the hard hour in AMP creating the 'desired' templates, it's not more than 5-10 mins to clean up future mismatches (time to resolve mismatches is even less after you've gotten the hang of it).

3 - The config audit report becomes more useful (especially for deployments that are supposed to be uniform)

4 - Tracking changes in your network config is easier (with time stamps to go along with relative time of the actual change on the controller for when the templates were updated)

5 - Should your network go down, AMP has the config in a ready to restore state

6 - It benefits future network admin (may or may not be your concern)

7 - You don't have to pay more for the feature, it's already there

Cons to keeping up with mismatches:

- A decent investment of time

Config audits don't take a lot of process power from AMP, so disabling audits isn't saving much in the long run.  For those who really don't care to see mismatches - it's a simple AMP Setup -> General tab -> Top Header stats box -> uncheck 'mismatches'.  You can even leave the group settings for audits as is, and instead hide the 'config status' column on list views.

At the recent Airheads (Las Vegas, 2013), existing customers were coming up to me saying they use AirWave to 25-30% of it's potential, how can they get more out of it?

Emphasis on point #7 - it's a feature you already have access to.  If it's at your fingertips and doesn't cost more money, make use of it.