Establishing End-to-End Visibility in SD-WAN Environments with DX NetOps

The move to software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) is happening rapidly, and on a large scale. However, many network operations teams are struggling to contend with the monitoring implications of these technologies. In this post, I’ll outline the visibility gaps posed by SD-WAN, and I’ll detail how DX NetOps by Broadcom addresses these gaps.  

SD-WAN market: Large, getting bigger

Already massive, the SD-WAN market is expected to see significant growth. Valued at $3.79 billion in 2023, the SD-WAN market is projected to have compound annual growth exceeding 30% and reach more than $32 billion in 2031. There a lot of vendors competing for this market, and mergers of vendors in this segment have been ongoing.

No doubt, the growth of SD-WAN is happening for good reason: This technology offers organizations unprecedented flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency. By moving from legacy networks to SD-WAN, organizations can achieve better performance, while using lower cost, commercially available technologies.

SD-WAN limitations: Constrained visibility

However, for all their benefits, SD-WAN technologies can present significant challenges for network operations teams, most critically, by introducing significant visibility gaps.

Overall, SD-WAN offerings on the market do a great job of providing visibility from edge to edge, that is, from a particular network’s ingress point to its egress point. For example, these solutions will offer metrics that reveal the performance of transmissions that take place between the network edge at the corporate data center and the edge at the branch office.

However, this edge-to-edge piece is only a fraction of the environments that ultimately shape the user’s digital experience. Typically, the user typically sits several hops away from one edge, and the service they ultimately connect to is several hops behind the other network edge. Beyond SD-WAN, there are many more devices, technologies, and protocols that are involved in network delivery.

These edge-to-edge views don’t account for the environments of work-from-home users, corporate VPNs, Wi-Fi technologies, routers and switches that operate within the four walls of the data center, backend applications, databases, and web services.

Common problems arising in SD-WAN environments

In addition to the visibility limitations presented by these technologies, SD-WAN environments are susceptible to various issues. Here are some common problems that level one and level two network engineers typically encounter in these environments:

• Connectivity issues. In these instances, sites lack the ability to establish VPN connections. With point tools, teams struggle to identify the root cause in the underlay and to determine the impact the issue has on the user experience.
• Link failures. In these cases, one or more links are either down or experiencing intermittent failures.
• Performance degradation. SD-WAN is inherently designed for performance routing. However, teams often find it difficult to identify when tunnels experience latency issues or when users are experiencing slow app performance.
• Performance based routing issues. In these scenarios, incorrect routing leads to traffic traversing a suboptimal path.

Requirements

To address the visibility limitations and issues that arise in SD-WAN environments, network operations teams need advanced network observability solutions. These groups must be able to effectively track, manage, and optimize delivery. To do so, teams need to establish true end-to-end visibility into all the different technologies and domains that network-based services are reliant upon.

Solution: How DX NetOps by Broadcom can help

DX NetOps by Broadcom delivers the end-to-end coverage that is essential for effective management of the user experience in SD-WAN environments. DX NetOps provides visibility into every connection that shapes the delivery experience.

The solution offers multi-vendor coverage to support customers’ complex environments, and it correlates this intelligence and brings it into a single, unified console. With these capabilities, DX NetOps gives teams the insights they need to do fast, effective root cause analysis and remediation.

The solution provides critical visibility into how the underlay supports the overlay. This scalable, on-premises software solution delivers advanced capabilities in such areas as network analytics, operator dashboards, data correlation, and third-party integration.

In addition, DX NetOps features integration with AppNeta by Broadcom. AppNeta delivers active testing, providing ongoing insights into the user experience and feeding this intelligence into DX NetOps.

Advanced capabilities

End-to-end visibility

With DX NetOps, teams can gain unified, end-to-end visibility over their entire environment:

• Underlay and overlay visibility and correlation. The solution provides visibility into the overlay, including sites and locations, tunnels, VPNs, application policies, and SLAs. In addition, it offers comprehensive underlay visibility. Leveraging SNMP, telemetry, and controller data, DX NetOps provides key insights into edge router and interface performance. The solution can leverage a combination of active testing data and SD-WAN vendor data, which is what the SD-WAN edge uses to make routing decisions. The solution provides a deep level of visibility and it helps teams objectively validate behaviors and issues occurring in the underlay and overlay.
• Multi-vendor, multi-domain coverage. DX NetOps offers insights into the interrelated technologies that make up today’s modern networks. The solution provides visibility across multi-vendor, multi-technology ecosystems, unifying coverage from the SD-WAN edge to downstream LAN and Wi-Fi. DX NetOps delivers coverage of on-premises equipment and connections and it can track user experience metrics across ISP and cloud environments. With this visibility, teams can readily identify which domain an issue occurs in and where it is located within the network topology. Teams can pinpoint the root cause of the issue, including if it’s an issue in the underlay or in an external ISP or cloud environment.
• Application context and insights. The solution leverages Flow data and deep packet inspection (DPI) to provide visibility into users’ application experiences and usage. With DX NetOps, operators can determine if SD-WAN is choosing the right underlay connectivity for a given app. For example, if an app requires a low level of jitter, teams can determine whether the right transport is being employed to meet those requirements.

Streamlined, standardized triage workflows

DX NetOps supports the establishment of efficient and standardized triage workflows, enabling level one staff to solve more problems. Through the DX NetOps portal, operators can acknowledge alarms, assign a troubleshooter, create a ticket, and initiate a Slack conversation.

The solution puts right level of detail at operators’ fingertips, at the right time. With DX NetOps, operators can get the intelligence they need from one console, so they can avoid having to login and access disparate vendor tools. The solution’s unified dashboards offer views into multiple vendors and technologies, including traditional and software-defined, and across regions and within a location.

With this unified visibility, the solution enables teams to establish standard operating procedures across multi-vendor technologies, fueling efficient, optimized workflows. DX NetOps also supports “follow the red” workflows that make it fast and easy for users to drill down and access the required details.

Intelligent alarms and ticketing

With its contextual intelligence, DX NetOps delivers actionable tickets that help teams to understand the context of issues and stay focused on the problems that have the biggest organizational impact. The solution correlates events from SD-WAN and other technologies, and filters out redundant and non-critical alarms.

Through AppNeta active testing, teams can quickly validate problems that arise, no matter where across the SD-WAN environment they appear. If an outage occurs, teams can use active testing to validate that SD-WAN is routing traffic correctly to avoid the problematic service or domain.

DX NetOps offers deep integration with ITSM, ticketing, and collaboration tools, including ServiceNow, Remedy, Jira, and PagerDuty. With the solution’s two-way integration, teams can access tickets through the DX NetOps portal, and access monitoring details in their service desk.

Conclusion

With DX NetOps, teams can eliminate the monitoring visibility gaps that SD-WAN technologies present. Teams get the end-to-end visibility and actionable insights needed to maximize performance and availability in SD-WAN environments. The solution helps speed mean time to innocence, so for example, a team can quickly and objectively demonstrate that the issue is not occurring in the local network. Moreover, the solution accelerates mean time to insight, pinpointing the location and cause of the issue, even if it arises in a network that your internal team doesn’t own or manage.

To learn more, be sure to watch our Small Bytes session, Correlate SD-WAN for Root Cause of Performance Issues. View this session and see a detailed demonstration of DX NetOps SD-WAN correlation in action.

Our Small Bytes series offers practical examples on getting the most from Broadcom solution investments. Visit our Small Bytes page to see a complete list of upcoming and on-demand presentations in the series.