Uses of OSS Augmented Reality in the Data Centre

I was doing some research on Ubiquiti’s NMS/OSS tools yesterday and stumbled upon the brilliant Augmented Reality (AR) capability that it has (I think).

I’ve converted to a video shown below (apologies for the low-res – you can try clicking here for Ubiquiti’s full-res view)

I especially love how it uses the OLED at the left side of the chassis almost like a QR code to uniquely identify the chassis and then cross-link with current status information pulled from Ubiquiti’s UNMS (assumedly).

As mentioned in this post from all the way back in 2014, the potential for this type of AR functionality is huge if / when linked to OSS / BSS data. Some of the potential use-cases for inside the data centre as cited in the 2014 article were:

1. Tracing a cable (or patchlead) route through the complex cabling looms in a DC
2. Showing an overlay of key information above each rack (and then each device inside the rack):
   1. Highest alarm severity within the rack (eg a flashing red beacon above each rack that has a critical alarm on any device within it, then a red beacon on any device inside the rack that has critical alarms)
   2. Operational state of each device / card / port within the rack
   3. Active alarms on each device
   4. Current port-state of each port
   5. Performance metrics relating to each device / port (either in current metric value or as a graph/s)
   6. Configuration parameters relating to each device / port (eg associated customer, service, service type or circuit name)
3. Showing design / topology configurations for a piece of equipment
4. Showing routing or far-end connectivity coming from a physical port (ie where the cable ultimately terminates, which could be in the same DC or in another state / country)

I believe that some of these features have since been implemented in working solutions or proofs-of-concept but I haven’t seen any out in the wild. Have you?

I’d love to hear from you if you’ve already used these Ubiquiti tools and/or have seen AR / OSS solutions actually being used in the field. What are your thoughts on their practicality?

What other use-cases can you think of? Note that the same 2014 article also discusses some AR use-cases that extend beyond the DC.