SD-WAN Monitoring: Why Edge-to-Edge Coverage Isn’t Enough

In recent years, network operations teams have had to contend with several critical challenges, including:

• Addressing demands to rapidly and cost effectively scale internet connectivity.
• Adapting to the rapid move to a work-from-anywhere paradigm.
• Responding to the fundamental shifts introduced by the move to the cloud.

In response to these challenges, teams are increasingly turning to SD-WAN. The market for SD-WAN is massive, and continuing to grow, potentially reaching $47 billion by 2031. Through SD-WAN technologies, organizations are able to realize a number of benefits. However, these benefits aren’t a sure thing. In fact, many teams encounter challenges with their SD-WAN implementations.

What are some of the roadblocks that teams are encountering? For many, a lack of visibility emerges as a primary obstacle. While SD-WAN vendors offer monitoring capabilities, these offerings effectively provide edge-to-edge coverage, tracking the performance of connections that exist between two edge routers.

This visibility is lacking in a few key respects:

• First, networking services are reliant upon much more than the connectivity between these routers. Back-end infrastructure, third-party networks, users’ Wi-Fi networks, and more can all play a significant role.
• Second, these edge-to-edge monitoring views aren’t correlated. This means teams have to contend with adopting additional monitoring tools, and the labor-intensive effort of aggregating and analyzing data from different products.
• Third, these SD-WAN environments can introduce a deluge of additional metrics and alarms that teams need to manage.

Compounding matters is the fact that many teams have a shortage of SD-WAN experts available. When issues arise, front-tier operators often lack the data they need, which means scarce, highly paid SD-WAN experts routinely need to be brought in to triage issues. This leads to lengthier troubleshooting efforts and proliferating costs. Further, given these limitations, teams are constantly wading through overwhelming amounts of data and left reacting to issues—rather than managing service levels proactively.

The solution

To overcome these limitations and successfully manage their SD-WAN powered network services, teams need DX NetOps by Broadcom. DX NetOps delivers the correlated intelligence that enables teams to effectively track, manage, and optimize their SD-WAN environments.

DX NetOps enables teams to establish holistic visibility and effective baselines, so they can distinguish between optimal and suboptimal performance. With the solution, teams can begin to identify emerging issues and address them before critical services are affected. Here are some of the key capabilities DX NetOps delivers. 
In addition, with AppNeta by Broadcom, teams can gain an end-to-end understanding of network performance, no matter where users or critical business apps may be.

Effective pre- and post-deployment baselines

In order to objectively gauge the success of SD-WAN implementations, it is important for teams to monitor and measure performance and establish effective baselines, before, during, and after their rollout. With DX NetOps, teams can effectively compare the effectiveness of SD-WAN to the prior WAN. The solution delivers the vital intelligence teams need to track, manage, and quantify the success of their SD-WAN rollouts.

End-to-end coverage

With Broadcom solutions, teams can gain end-to-end visibility across cloud and SaaS provider networks, third-party ISP networks, data center and branch office infrastructure, end user Wi-Fi and VPN environments, and more.

Correlated overlay and underlay visibility

As referenced earlier, SD-WAN vendors only provide edge-to-edge coverage. By contrast, DX NetOps delivers end-to-end coverage, tracking the way end users actually experience network-based services.

DX NetOps delivers correlated visibility that encompasses not only the SD-WAN tunnel overlay, but the underlay. With the solution, teams can track infrastructure utilization. Teams can assess a specific tunnel’s performance, and then quickly get more detail. For example, an operator can drill down into a WAN edge interface that connects the enterprise to the provider, and get details on performance, connectivity, flows, events, and usage.

Key metric coverage

DX NetOps delivers coverage of latency, loss, and jitter. These are key metrics that help teams understand traffic performance across SD-WAN tunnels. These metrics are critical to track because they are what SD-WAN edge routers use to make routing decisions.  

With AppNeta SD-WAN monitoring, teams can add coverage of mean opinion score (MOS) metrics, as well as voice-specific jitter and packet loss. AppNeta can also track round-trip response time. These metrics can augment the data captured from SD-WAN controllers, offering a more comprehensive view.

Intelligent forecasting

Once administrators have established effective baselines and monitoring coverage, DX NetOps can help network operations, performance, and capacity teams to track performance over time. With the solution, teams can more intelligently spot patterns and make projections, including in terms of infrastructure and application utilization and network traffic and congestion. For example, the solution can monitor direct broadband-to-internet traffic usage, enabling managers to forecast capacity needs as the number of users or applications expands. This intelligent forecasting is essential in enabling teams to begin to manage their environments more proactively.

Sophisticated, flexible dashboards and analytics

Finally, DX NetOps makes metrics easy for teams to consume, and offers complete flexibility in how views are organized. Teams can view data through different lenses, for example, they can focus on site-to-site traffic, overall metrics for a specific service provider, or details for a specific geographic region. The solution enables administrators to view different time horizons. Teams can customize metric views based on maximum or minimum values, averages, percentiles, baseline deviations, and more.

Watch our presentation to learn more

To learn more, be sure to watch our Small Bytes presentation on how to baseline SD-WAN performance to easily identify policy violations. Find out how to establish the monitoring coverage your teams need to be successful with your SD-WAN deployments. Find out how to identify key baselines and more proactively manage performance across your modern networks.