Cape Networks is now a part of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Company.

That’s right folks, the leadership at Aruba officially announced today that they are acquiring Cape Networks and it’s technology, in order to address a great need for network administrators today in network visibility. This, along with the acquisition of Rasa Networks (rebranded as Aruba NetInsight) last year, is yet another acquisition by Aruba of a company that can provide additional visibility into the network and help resolve issues before they become big problems.

About 13 months ago in February 2017, I was sitting at the WirelessLAN Professionals conference in Phoenix, AZ toying around with an Odroid mini PC that was similar in style to the raspberry pi. The project was driven by Jerry Olla and his desire to help the WLAN community by creating a small, portable platform that would allow administrators to test network performance easily. Later that conference, we were also given an SD card with a preloaded image on it for network monitoring software that was being developed by an up and coming company with lots of ambition and drive. That company was known as Cape Networks.

Over the course of many months, the wireless community that was present at the Phoenix conference had the ability to play around with the software and provide feedback on it’s usefulness and improvements that could greatly benefit network administrators. As the product evolved, it quickly became apparent to the team at Cape that the best way to continue forward was to start building their own hardware based sensors to run the software they had been working hard on creating. Unlike other companies, the team at Cape understood that one of the things that truly helps a product become mainstream is community feedback and quick reaction to that complaint/request.

So what all can Cape monitor you might be asking? Well, it’s almost easier to list the things that you can’t monitor with it.

Cape Networks Dashboard – Testing

You can see in the screenshot just a small number of things that the Cape sensor can test. DHCP, DNS, http gets, applications, internal & external items are also among the things that can be monitoring/tested. One of the highlights of the product is the ability to have packet captures of a problem when it occurs. The Cape sensor uses a built in buffer that all traffic passes through as it’s source of information for the packet capture. This is something that I’ve seen a couple other vendors doing that I wished Aruba had in their product, and am glad to see that it will become part of the Aruba product line.

Cape Networks Dashboard – Thresholds

The product also does a great job of providing alerting to the user based on customizable alerting levels. The screenshot above shows just a small portion of the items that the sensor can alert on for the end user. For now the product is cloud based only, and not available to run as part of an on-prem solution, but can tie into other platforms to help the help desk workflow of your organization.

Needless to say, I for one am very excited to see where the Cape products can go now with the resources of a big time player in the wireless industry. I expect at the very least this acquisition will allow Aruba to funnel more data into the AI engines such as the NetInsight product to allow faster TTR for potential network issues. After all, it’s all about machine learning these days.

Questions/Comments as always are welcome.

-Scott