An IT technician plugs in a factory-default AP for the new surgical wing, but after several minutes it still has not appeared in Aruba Central's device list, even though the AP has a link light and appears to have network connectivity. What is the most likely explanation, assuming the AP was already added to the hospital's Central inventory?

For zero-touch provisioning to complete, the AP must be able to reach the internet-facing activation/onboarding service so it can identify itself and pull down its assigned configuration; if that reachability is blocked — by a missing route, a restrictive firewall rule, or a VLAN with no path out — the AP will sit connected at Layer 1/2 with a link light but never appear in Central, matching the symptom exactly. Factory RF channel settings affect what channel the AP transmits on for client association; they have no bearing on whether the device can reach a cloud service to register itself, so this doesn't explain the symptom. Central does not gate visibility in its device list behind a scheduled firmware update — devices typically appear as soon as they successfully check in, well before any firmware cycle runs. Manually typing an SSID locally is a step from the old on-site, human-driven setup model and isn't a prerequisite for zero-touch onboarding; requiring it would defeat the entire purpose of automatic provisioning. A caveat: this same symptom can also appear if the AP was never actually added to the hospital's Central inventory in the first place, so inventory assignment is worth double-checking alongside connectivity. Operational check: from the switch port the AP is connected to, confirm it received a valid IP and can reach the internet, then check DNS resolution to the activation service specifically.