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Network monitoring in SD-WAN

Sep 11, 2018

sd-wanSD-WAN technology provides customers the capability to manage their own network without requiring managed services from the traditional service providers. However, so that the client can manage its own platform, a powerful tool has to be used, which manages and solves incidents.

One of the key advantages of SD-WAN is the generation of a secured overlay on top of the transport networks. This overlay provides simplification to send the traffic through different WANs depending on the network performance, providing an application-centric solution, so it guarantees the application performance. Furthermore, the overlay helps to understand what is happening in the network, showing applications’ traffic.

Correlation of the alarms

This change in the network paradigm (from IP to applications), makes it necessary to identify the applications and prioritize based on policies, but in case of failure or performance degradation, customers require a notification with the maximum information to find the root of the issue.

SD-WAN solutions must provide a robust monitoring solution that help operations departments to solve quickly their incidents, providing the information on the issue’s origin, and which remote offices and/or applications are affected. For performing this task, the monitoring capability on the SD-WAN solution must be able to link an issue in the network and/or a device, with the applications and the remote offices affected, providing the end-customer and the corresponding operation’s department valuable information to solve the problem.

As the SD-WAN solutions have centralized management tools, where all the information is available, the solution should link all the elements to understand how the network is built: remote offices link to WANs, remote offices link to applications and applications link to WANs.

Having all this information together allows to group the alarms from the same root cause together to have a quick view, the source of the problem and which are the remote offices and applications affected. For example, if a port issue in a device has been detected, and some applications have switched from the primary to the secondary WAN link, all the notifications (port issue in a specific branch office, SLA degradation in a WAN, and application switch) will be grouped together, so the user knows that there is a problem in a specific port in a specific branch office which is affecting certain applications (if they are critical applications perhaps other actions should be planned).

Application trends

Apart from the alarms correlation, the SD-WAN technology opens the possibility to analyze the traffic of each application. The availability of all the information in a centralized tool gives the capability to analyze the traffic and generates statistics on the use of a specific application or a group of applications.

The application visibility feature analyzes the behavior of each application along a period of time to create an application “traffic profile” which will depend on the week day, or on a specific period of the year, or for example, in the country in which the remote office is located.

For example, during working days and working hours the average bandwidth usage in a remote office is high, but at night or during the weekends, usually there is no traffic in the branch offices. If the application behavior is different from the application traffic profile, the tool can send a notification to investigate the issue and detect malicious access to the applications.

These traffic profiles are also used to prevent issues or low performance in the network. If the tool detects a fast increment of a specific application’s bandwidth usage, it can re-prioritize the application or hire additional bandwidth. It can also be useful to detect applications with low usage, so the company can decide to stop using them.

Conclusion

SD-WAN should not only be the technology for easy remote office deployments and application steering, it must become the vehicle to make a complete transformation of the enterprise networks, giving the end-customer the possibility to fully manage the network, and eventually build a carrier independent solution.

To reach this objective, the solution must provide a powerful monitoring capability to detect, identify the root causes and solve the problems in the network without having to depend on the WAN provider.

Teldat is providing this capability with our SD-WAN solution, adding more and more capabilities to offer our customers a full monitoring experience.

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