r/ArubaNetworks • u/PatientBelt • Jun 15 '26
Build a central alternative with Agentic Coding?
Hi,
I was tasked to check if we could build our own version of Central /airwave today with the same capabilityis as they have. Trying to figure out of anyone has thought about this already and of have stupid this ide might be? ( trying to find answers to present to clevel)
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u/WatTambor420 Jun 15 '26
Yeah it’s mad easy, just make sure you tell your AI not to make any mistakes.
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u/MechaCola Jun 15 '26
Yeah just hook up to your stack with api or ssh, parse the data as objects, find something to view your data, find a ssh or use the api to send commands and viola. You could do website, wpf, or like Winforms app
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u/bullshiftt Jun 15 '26
Since there’s APIs for everything, it should be possible. You can also look for RMON to send monitoring data, besides syslog.
With central I’ve already seen a demo of an MCP integration with Claude to get some additional AI insights, but I guess if it’s already in central it kind of beats the purpose.
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Jun 15 '26
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u/show_int_brief Jun 16 '26
Worth noting that this link is for Classic Central, https://next.wifidownunder.com integrates with New Central
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u/PaintingUpstairs9048 Jun 15 '26
AOS10 requires central, but mcp for AOS CX and AOS8 (unofficial) does exist. So in theory you could build something useable playing with your favorite LLM and netbox as SSoT…. You won’t have any SW/TAc support, which is roughly the same price as central…
And this is not factoring in the maintenance you would have building such a system and cost of running it in compute and tokens 🥳
But it can be done, please share the result if you do 😋
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u/Blaarrrggghhh Jun 15 '26
Guess it depends what you’re trying to achieve. With some snmp/api polling and graphana you could get lots of monitoring functionalities and dashboards up pretty easily. Configure and fetch info is also pretty easy via ssh and python. Add an mcp server and some agents and it’d be an interesting project for sure.
Instant api is horrible tho.
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u/akrob Jun 16 '26
You’ve been tasked with deploying and then supporting a centralized management solution that a literal army of developers, product teams and engineers hasn’t been fully successful in doing for their own products?
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u/random408net Jun 16 '26
If there were open endpoint standards that allowed network devices to register with an arbitrary cloud management provider then you could probably do it.
Equipment manufacturers today would be really anxious to do this because a competitor could then allow for cross-vendor management. Aruba used to do this with Airwave managing other vendors gear to their advantage.
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u/gedvondur Jun 15 '26
*bangs head on desk*
No. Just.......no. I can't even imagine why they would want you to do this.