Table of contents
User Experience Insight(UXI) Design
This section describes the features and capabilities of the Aruba User Experience Insights (UXI) solution. Topics include a sample customer use case, sensor onboarding, service and app tests, and other considerations for implementation.
UXI comprises a cloud-hosted dashboard, physical sensors, and software agents deployed onsite. Together, they function as a remote technician. The UXI sensors onboard to a network as an end-user and actively monitor all aspects of connectivity to applications in a data center or in the cloud, providing a detailed performance analysis from an edge perspective via a highly intuitive cloud-hosted UXI dashboard.
By providing a near real-time view of the network from the network edge, Aruba UXI can improve improve users’ work efficiency, expedite IT response times, and boost end-user trust in IT. This comes from the ability to observe network behavior remotely from the same perspective as a network end-user.
Each sensor continuously runs pre-defined or easily customizable tests on the network, network services, and internal and external applications. Combined with a simple yet deep cloud-based user interface, a real-time view of the networks and applications the way users see them. UXI can validate network changes and reduce the mean time to identify issues. User Experience Insight is vendor-agnostic and can be used as a stand-alone tool, but it also adds unique perspective and value combined with the other Aruba ESP solutions.
UXI’s traffic-light-themed dashboard makes it easy to see a client’s experience when onboarding, using network services, and accessing applications.
The last 30 days of network performance data are available for download from the UXI dashboard, along with PCAP files, to increase network visibility.
This section details the steps to deploy UXI for Orange Widget Logistics (OWL) described on the Reference Customer page.
- Aruba UXI Cloud Dashboard
- Aruba UXI Sensor UX-G5 and UX-G6 Series
Technical Use Case
The OWL IT department has a centralized helpdesk call center in the Roseville, CA headquarters, with no IT presence in other branch and office locations. UXI sensors are deployed and configured to monitor network and application performance at the Seattle campus. The deployment process shown in this guide can be repeated for the rest of the locations.
Roseville Campus
In the diagram above, the UXI sensor is located on the lower right. It is connected to one of the access layer switches.
Business Use Case
It is important to mention the “people” aspect of this solution briefly because Aruba UXI addresses non-technical problems that have affected IT departments for decades. The following section describes OWL IT leadership’s expectations for the Aruba UXI solution:
For IT:
Improve work-life balance by reducing or eliminating unnecessary IT escalations that previously required contacting the on-call engineer during non-business hours.
Expedite IT’s mean time to resolution (MTTR) by providing client-side visibility that previously required an onsite local resource to walk through troubleshooting over the phone.
Boost users’ trust in IT by eliminating the following common situation:
IT: “There’s nothing wrong with the Wi-Fi”
Local User: “But I can’t connect!”
For Users:
- Reduce company employee frustration by improving Time to Resolution when calling IT.
- Enhance employee productivity by proactively identifying and addressing issues before they require calls to the IT Helpdesk.
UXI Tests
The UXI dashboard allows configuration of tests for each network or sensor group. Predefined templates requiring minimal configuration are available for common services (such as popular SaaS applications) and can be selected from the test template list. Custom templates enable the creation of a custom test and configuration to more specific parameters. Custom tests also have predefined templates for testing metrics such as iPerf, telnet, VoIP MOS, and web servers.
The UXI Help site provides complete details of tests and how to configure them.
AIOps Incident Detection
User Experience Insight sensors run synthetic tests one at a time in a continuous round-robin sequence. When these tests identify a problem, an issue is generated. Two types of issues observed in the dashboard generate notifications: threshold violations and test failures.
The AIOps Incident Detection system examines the issue data in real-time to identify issues that are significantly different from the typical issue profile of a particular network. Anomalous issues are consolidated into an incident and presented on the dashboard. An incident is a collection of related anomalous issues.
Incident Detection requires the training of a machine learning model for the issues profile of a particular network deployment.
When an issue is detected and the timing of the arrival of the issue in relation to other issues does not conform to the model, the anomalous issue and other related non-conforming issues appear in red on the dashboard to indicate that this set of issues might need immediate attention. Emails, alerts, and other notifications are sent only for issues that are classified as incidents on the dashboard.
When an issue is detected and the timing of the arrival of the issue in relation to other issues conforms to the model, the issue appears blue to indicate it is informational. Email and webhook alerts are not sent for these issues.
Note: AIOps Incident Detection requires at least 20 active sensors and sufficient issue data to build a relevant model for a particular network. The model is recalculated every week.
Monitoring Requirements
OWL’s Roseville campus consists of three buildings totaling close to 100,000 square feet of office space. Building 1 contains a high concentration of conference rooms on the first floor; Building 2 houses IT, Finance, and other offices; and Building 3 is the R&D department and distribution warehouse.
Sensor Requirements
There are many ways to design an Aruba UXI deployment. The first method described in this guide consists of one UXI sensor per building. Additional information can be found on the UXI Best Practice Design page.
Additional Objectives
In addition to monitoring networks and services, the configuration also includes:
- Optimize bandwidth/resource utilization using sensors to ensure that future rollouts of sensors do not cause oversubscription of a branch location’s limited WAN circuit.
- Configure read-only and read-write capabilities for different departments to allow IT Helpdesk to log in and view sensor data.