Network Management

I'm trying to wrap my head around what Airwave can do for me in our wireless environment - so this question probably seems a little "noob"ish.. I apologize in advance..

We're a 99.99% all aruba shop with 10 campuses managed by a central controller... About 300 APs.

Problems that we're currently having seem like they relate to too many devices connecting to to few APs - but I don't have any historical data logged anywhere to point at and say "Here's your problem".

I'd like a tool where someone can call me up and tell me they had a problem during a particular time period in a particular area and I can pull up statistics to determine if this is a real issue or if it's a perceived issue (e.g. user issue).

Can Airwave do this?

Thanks

The short and emphatic answer is yes.

Please check out a few of the Airwave training webcasts here:  http://www.arubanetworks.com/company/news-events/webcasts/#airwave

Thanks to all...

I've got an eval running right now.. does someone have a link to a quick config guide to help me get started?

I thought I had it good to go, but I'm not seeing any user data or traffic data.. it's been up all day...

Thanks

The documentation on support.arubanetworks.com should be available.  Navigate to Software User & Reference Guides -> AirWave -> 7.5.x (http://support.arubanetworks.com/DOCUMENTATION/tabid/77/DMXModule/512/Default.aspx?EntryId=8043), make sure you're following the Quick Start Guide for the installation, and then the AirWave/Aruba Best Practice Guide for configuration.  If you're still having difficulties, open a case with support and they should be able to get you up and running.

I think you'll get a lot of benefit from having an AirWave server in your environment.  Your main concern was for historical data logging which AMP can do.  The historical data covers your own network devices, clients (active and inactive), rogues, reports, radius / ARM / IDS events, device configuration, guest users, etc.  Each retention value can be fine tuned to keep a longer history for the items that are more important to you.

For user perceived issues, you can configure the system to send alerts for when devices are down.  You'll also be able to see the signal and usage of the user during the duration they were seeing problems.  Using reports, you can track down if a user was on an overloaded AP, and additional trending.

My response has a weighted bias toward being pro-AMP, but seeing is believing so I'd suggest taking AMP for a test run.  Here's the informational page on AirWave on the Aruba Networks site: http://www.arubanetworks.com/products/management-security-software-2/airwave/.  Also, here's a link to the Eval Request: http://www.arubanetworks.com/cdw-eval-request/.

I'll echo the emphatic yes from cjoseph.

I can see more and better with airwave than we'd hoped. I encourage you to talk to your sales team about a trial and install the VM (unless you've got a spare server lying about) and take it for a spin.

We now have configuration change logging, upgrade staging, and great history.

A plus in our environment is that we can manager out iAP infrastructure (80 sites) and our controllers (5 sites) in one place.

--Matthew