Aruba Instant AP — Home Assistant Integration

A custom integration for Home Assistant that tracks devices connected to an Aruba Instant AP using the local REST API.

Disclaimer: This is an unofficial integration and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Aruba Networks. Use at your own risk.

🚧 Current Status

BETA - This integration is in active development and testing.

Features

• Device Tracker — marks devices home/away based on Wi-Fi association
• Extra attributes per device:
  • MAC — Client MAC Address
  • Host name — Client host name
  • access_point — which AP the device is connected to
  • essid — the SSID/network name
  • ip_address — current IP address
  • os — operating system detected by the IAP
  • channel — Wi-Fi channel
  • signal — signal strength
  • speed — link speed
• Config Flow — set up entirely from the HA UI, no YAML required
• Track new devices toggle — choose whether newly discovered devices are tracked by default (off by default)
• Friendly name renaming — rename any device via the HA entity registry

Requirements

• Aruba Instant AOS 8.5.0+ (REST API support)
• Admin account for API
• REST API must be enabled on the IAP:

(Instant AP)(config)# configure
(Instant AP)(config)# allow-rest-api
(Instant AP)(config)# end
(Instant AP)# commit apply

Installation

HACS (recommended)

1. Add this repository as a custom repository in HACS
2. Search for "Aruba Device Tracker" and install
3. Restart Home Assistant

Manual

1. Copy the custom_components/aruba_device_tracker folder into your HA config/custom_components/ directory
2. Restart Home Assistant

Setup

1. Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration
2. Search for Aruba Device Tracker
3. Enter:
   • IP Address — your IAP/VC IP (e.g. 192.168.1.10)
   • Username — IAP admin username
   • Password — IAP admin password
   • Track new devices by default — toggle on/off
   • Polling Interval - Devices are polled every 30 seconds by default. Update if required.

Options

After setup, the options for polling interval and track new devices are available in the integration. To change the IP or user credentials click Configure on the integration.

Renaming Devices

Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Aruba Device Tracker, click a device entity, then click the pencil icon to give it a friendly name. This is stored in the HA entity registry and persists across restarts.

Default away timer behaviour

The default Aruba IAP client inactivity timer is 1000 seconds (16 minutes 40 seconds). This means when a client disconnects from the wireless network, the session will remain in the client table for 1000 seconds.

• Time for a device to show as away: 1000 seconds + time until next poll
• Time for a device to show as home: Time until next poll after the client connects (default under 30 seconds).

You may want to reduce the inactivity timer. For example, to 300 seconds (5 minutes):

Note

Consider the impact of lowering this value in your environment. Be cautious of going to low. The inactivity timeout controls how long a client session remains active after disconnecting.

Via Web GUI

1. Navigate to Configuration > Networks, select your network and click Edit (pencil icon)
2. Click Show Advanced
3. Under Miscellaneous, update Inactivity timeout to the desired value

4. Scroll to the bottom. Next > Next > Next Finish

Via CLI

Instant AP (config) # wlan ssid-profile <name>
Instant AP (SSID Profile "<name>") # inactivity-timeout <interval>    (60-86400 seconds)
Instant AP (SSID Profile "<name>") # inactivity-timeout 300
Instant AP (SSID Profile "<name>") # end
Instant AP# commit apply