SD-WAN Performance: Don’t Trust, Validate. Here’s How

Across regions and industries, organizations are continuing to expand their use of SD-WAN technologies. This move is happening for good reason. With SD-WAN, organizations are realizing reduced costs, improved communication security, and enhanced flexibility. One of the ways SD-WAN delivers these benefits is through an intelligent layer of abstraction that manages network traffic and dynamically controls the flow of data.

However, this intelligence isn’t foolproof. To ensure network users continuously experience optimized service levels, network operations teams must validate that these performance-based routing decisions are happening correctly. Further, they need to be able to track all the environments that run beyond the SD-WAN edge—and that have an impact on the ultimate service levels being delivered.

In this post, we’ll explore the monitoring obstacles SD-WAN tools present. In addition, we’ll outline how DX NetOps by Broadcom addresses the gaps presented by SD-WAN technologies and enables teams to validate these tools’ automated routing changes.

Limitations of SD-WAN visibility

When running SD-WAN, teams can leverage integrated monitoring capabilities that track the performance of transmissions that traverse two edges of an SD-WAN path. However, this edge-to-edge piece is only a fraction of the environments that ultimately shape the user’s digital experience.

Beyond SD-WAN, there are many more devices, technologies, and protocols that are involved in network delivery. For example, 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.

While many of these environments and elements are out of the internal network operations team’s control, these teams are nevertheless responsible for users being able to access critical business services. (For more information on the monitoring obstacles presented by SD-WAN, be sure to review my prior post, Establishing End-to-End Visibility in SD-WAN Environments with DX NetOps.)

How DX NetOps can help

DX NetOps 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. This scalable, on-premises software solution delivers advanced capabilities in such areas as network analytics, operator dashboards, data correlation, and third-party integration.

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.

In SD-WAN environments, the solution provides critical visibility into how the underlay supports the overlay. 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.

Key capabilities

Leverage extensive metric tracking

With the solution, operations teams can leverage the data they need to be successful. DX NetOps monitors and reports on a large set of metrics to provide full operational visibility.

The solution can track such key metrics as latency, loss, and jitter. These are the metrics SD-WAN edge routers use to gauge the performance of a given path and to manage their performance-based routing. The solution tracks round-trip-response times and it provides information on utilization and underlay performance. These metrics may not be readily available from SD-WAN tools, but operations teams need this level of visibility to effectively track and manage their environments.

Access powerful, flexible visualizations

With DX NetOps, teams can leverage a range of powerful, insightful dashboards, which are fully customizable. The solution features dashboards on SD-WAN performance, mapping service levels from an edge-to-edge perspective.

Operators can quickly gauge tunnel performance and drill in for more details. For example, they can readily identify problems and then double-click on an item to get to a context page with more details. Here are a few additional dashboard features and capabilities:

• Discard percentages. See a ranked listing of devices’ discard percentages, quickly identify those with the worst performance and most likely to have a negative impact on user experiences.
• Geomaps. DX NetOps provides geographic visualizations, including from the perspective of the overlay, the underlay, and the end user experience.
• Scorecards. Teams can look at scorecards with various time intervals, including hourly and daily rollups, past 24 hours, and prior three days. In addition, they can view forecasts for the next three days.
• Intuitive workflows. DX NetOps offers intuitive processes for spotting and diagnosing problems. The solution provides color coding so teams can readily identify problematic areas. The solution makes it easy for administrators to “follow the red,” rapidly spotting problems and gaining additional intelligence.
• Speed and bandwidth comparison. DX NetOps offers intuitive visibility into the relative response and throughput of various network paths. The solution offers invaluable insights that help teams track what they’re paying for versus what they’re getting, so they can better manage vendor relationships and hold providers accountable.

See baselines and projections

DX NetOps provides an array of capabilities for establishing effective baselines and making accurate projections:

• Adaptable timeframes. With the solution, users can do ad hoc projections and adapt timeframes as needed. They can do projections up to two years out. They can also reduce timeframes to look in more detail at flows surrounding a particular event.
• Capacity trending. DX NetOps provides critical capacity information. Teams can track how an ISP’s capacity is trending, including over 30, 90, or 180 days.
• Flexible baselining. The solution offers metrics such as up and down time, bytes and packets for specific tunnels, data loss, and latency. Teams can efficiently track performance compared to baselines for latency, loss, and jitter. These capabilities give teams insights into what’s happening currently and enable them to anticipate potential emerging issues.
• Minimum and maximums. DX NetOps enables administrators to establish minimum and maximum metrics. In addition, administrators can do percentile calculations. While 95th percentile is the default and industry norm, users can set two additional percentiles. By using the 95th percentile, the solution helps eliminate spikes from the data set, improving forecast accuracy.
• Derived metrics. DX NetOps can deliver derived metrics. Teams can look at baselines and forecasted projections based on trends. Users can do 30-, 60-, and 90-day projections. This gives teams the visibility they need to proactively manage their environments and avoid congestion as utilization rises.

Harness full user-experience metrics

With DX NetOps, operations teams can track the experience of users whose connections traverse SD-WAN tunnels. Teams can effectively focus on metrics that are related to the user experience, including mean opinion score (MOS), data loss, and jitter, both from an inbound and outbound perspective. They can also track voice traffic, including doing quick threshold comparisons. The solution makes it easy for users to understand normal ranges and how current performance compares. Based on trending data, the solution can also provide projections for user experience.

Conclusion

DX NetOps gives network operations teams the visibility they need to successfully track and optimize service levels. The solution arms operations teams with key metrics on traffic as it traverses WANs, whether SD-WAN or traditional networks, as well as data centers, private and public clouds, SaaS providers, and more.

To learn more, be sure to watch our Small Bytes session, Monitor SD-WAN performance-based routing policies to validate SLAs. View this session and see a detailed demonstration of DX NetOps in action.

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