SD-WAN: Monitoring Blind Spots, and What to Do About Them

The adoption of software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technologies continues to pick up pace. By employing SD-WAN technologies, organizations have the potential to realize a range of advantages. Teams can achieve better performance while using lower cost, using commercially-available technologies.

For example, teams can use public internet services rather than more expensive private WAN technologies, such as MPLS.  Not surprisingly, these technologies are expected to see a rapid uptake in adoption. In fact, this category is expected to grow from $3.4 billion in 2022 to $13.7 billion by 2027.

SD-WAN: potential unrealized

However, the reality is that, as we speak with customers, we often hear these deployments aren’t fulfilling all their potential; there can be many reasons for this. Sometimes we hear teams say that they’re not getting all the cost reductions expected. Most commonly, we hear that NetOps teams struggle because they’re encountering significant monitoring blind spots across all the networks their business services rely on.

Even after deploying the latest SD-WAN technologies, teams are only able to get edge-to-edge visibility. Employing SD-WAN vendors’ monitoring tools, teams may be able to monitor traffic between a data center edge and a branch office edge. However, user services rely on a lot of infrastructure that resides behind those edges. For example, transactions will be stored in backend databases, and user transactions may rely upon calls to those backend databases.

The solution: Experience-Driven NetOps

Ultimately, teams need to monitor the end-to-end network path, not just the edge-to-edge tunnel. This is why so many teams are turning to the Experience-Driven NetOps solution from Broadcom. Just some of the key capabilities the solution provides include:

Complete coverage of SD-WAN and beyond

Experience-Driven NetOps offers complete coverage of SD-WAN environments, including sites, tunnels, overlay, and underlay. This coverage spans whatever regions or networks user traffic may traverse.

Further, the solution offers coverage of virtually all SD-WAN technologies. Whether one or several different vendor solutions are employed, the solution enables teams to track performance from a single, unified portal.

In addition, Experience-Driven NetOps enables teams to inspect network paths beyond the SD-WAN environment, including networks managed by third-party ISPs. Teams can assess how specific service provider networks are performing.

Simple, flexible alarms

Today, it is standard operating procedure for operations teams to start with alarms and move to troubleshooting from there. This solution offers a central portal that makes it easy to set up alarms, so the team members are alerted when deviations from established baselines occur. Teams can establish baselines, track them, and get alerts on several measurements, including latency, packet loss, capacity, and round-trip response times.

An operator can set up a rule for round-trip time of a key end-user transaction, and have an alert generated if, for example, if it is exceeding a baseline by 50% or more, and if this deviation is occurring for longer than 30 minutes. Through these intelligent alarm capabilities, teams can ensure they’re being alerted when significant issues are occurring that need to be investigated, not when a blip occurs that doesn’t have any impact on service levels.

Intuitive, powerful dashboards

Teams can quickly and easily understand the health of their SD-WAN environments. The solution features dashboards that enable operators to quickly inspect metrics like packet loss, latency, and jitter. These dashboards enable users to quickly drill down to understand more detail.

For example, an administrator can look at latency metrics over time, and gain a better understanding of trends, baselines, and deviations. Or an operator may see that packet loss is occurring on some tunnels and needs to be investigated.

Watch our presentation to learn more

To learn more, be sure to watch our Small Bytes presentation, How do I validate performance of my SD-WANs that deliver critical end-user apps? This session will offer a demonstration of how teams can quickly and easily monitor the health and performance of their SD-WAN environments.