WAN Insights

Stop Reacting to Issues. Start Preventing Them.

In today's connected world, delivering superior digital experiences is critical for every business. And cloud and Internet networks play a central role in this connected ecosystem. However, relying on these external environments can create blind spots that impact the digital experience of your employees. It also results in a reactive networking model, which puts user experience at risk by not addressing network issues until they’ve already affected application performance.

ThousandEyes WAN Insights enables enterprises to move from reactive to preventative by continuously analyzing performance data and applying statistical models to forecast conditions and recommend actions. With WAN Insights, network operations and IT teams can proactively avoid experience degradation or outages, confidently delivering the best possible user experience in the hybrid work era.

Experience WAN Insights in Action

Using ThousandEyes WAN Insights, Cisco SD-WAN customers can take a proactive approach to improving application experiences for their users. By leveraging historical network performance data from SD-WAN telemetry, ThousandEyes WAN Insights uses statistical models to forecast conditions allowing network teams to proactively optimize their IT infrastructure in order to improve users’ quality of experience on their Cisco SD-WAN. Improving long-term end-user experience for critical business applications, such as Microsoft 365 and collaborative services like voice and Webex by Cisco.

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WAN Insights Tutorial

ThousandEyes WAN Insights provides predictive analytics and forecasting to give you actionable recommendations that help improve the performance of your SD-WAN environment. WAN Insights can collect historical network performance data and forecast the path quality for user applications within SD-WAN networks. Based on these forecasts, it can recommend a path with a high probability of providing a better user experience. You can then apply these recommendations in vManage before the issue happens. WAN Insights allows you to easily track the performance of your current network setup and tune your policies and paths to achieve the best user experience. Let's take a look at it in action. Once activated, WAN Insights will appear along the left navigation bar within the ThousandEyes interface. You can see here there's two different sections which we'll explore today. The first is Recommendations. Recommendations is a list of all the different applications that you're currently monitoring as well as the different sites. It will then show you any performance recommendations based on what the current analytics are seeing and what you might do if you made a change, how much improvement you would see there. You'll see I have different applications such as Office 365, Google, and I have a voice category as well. So you can break it out by service provider, so Office, for example, or you can group them together so if you have multiple voice services from different providers you can categorize them all under one to show recommendations that would apply to any of those applications. Conversely if you have a critical application you care about such as SharePoint or Outlook, you can also just break that out into its own category to view just the recommendations and current performance data for that. Now let's take a look at one of the applications. Under the voice category, one of the tiles is showing me that I could see an almost 11% increase if I switch from using my current network setup, which is the business internet plus bronze, to just using the business internet connection. You can see it gives me site details along with how many users are at that site. If we click on the tile, it'll give us more information about that recommendation. What you're seeing now is a detailed view of that recommendation. If we look along the top, it tells us the site information along with number of users, the current setup, so which networks it's using, and then which ones we recommend you switch to, as well as the projected improvement. So again, that 10.79%. There's a timeline below and WAN Insights uses a seven-day sliding window to gather the data and you'll see here now the different lines, we're actually showing you what the current stats are, as well as the projected. So if I hover over those lines, it will actually show me what the recommended path quality is, and then what the default is. And I can scroll over time to actually see how that would look and how that changes over the window where we're collecting data from. The circle in the middle is showing us all the different users we have at this site and what the projected quality improvement would be. So it's a good way of visualizing all the different users and what kind of performance gains you would get. Let's select an endpoint pair now by clicking on this host. And now it's going to refresh with the data for this specific host and endpoint pairing. You'll notice a similar graph now that's going to chart out the exact performance over that window. If I hover over it, it's going to show that again, recommended quality and the default quality. And if I scroll over time, that updates to show the different statistics. On the right, we have a circuit composition. So this is showing me the current network setup and then what it would look like if I made that change that the recommendation is showing us what circuits would be involved and what path that traffic would take. Scrolling down, we get a detailed breakdown of the different metrics that we're collecting. So things like loss, latency, and jitter. And I can scroll over those and it'll show the different percentages for that time period. So this is a really useful view to be able to take all the information about a site and that specific application and view the recommendation for it to view the performance gains that we would get by switching that network setup. Now let's take a look at site details. This section will list all the different sites we're monitoring along with the applications associated with them. You can filter by specific sites or by specific applications. So if you only want to view your Office 365 apps, you can do that. We have some built-in applications that come with WAN Insights, but the users can also add in custom applications that you'd like to monitor with that data coming in from vAnalytics. If you click on a site, so for instance, this site using Office 365, we'll then get a more detailed view showing you the performance metrics, as well as that same circle and host pairings. So you'll be able to understand where the different endpoint pairs are. So endpoint to application and where you might see an improvement. We can filter on an endpoint pair just like before, and that will bring up those detailed stats. So it'll show you what paths they're currently using, as well as any metrics that we've collected. And you can view that recommendation as well. So if there was a recommendation in there on how to improve performance, you could click View Recommendation, and it would then show you the recommendation for that path, which path would be better, you can see this would have been an almost 2% improvement. And then you can view again, if you scroll down the comparison of current path, and if you change to a new path, what those stats would look like. So WAN Insights is really powerful, it collects a lot of data, and it gives you a really easy way to visualize that. It can help teams reduce trouble tickets. It can help with policy validation to make sure what your policies are currently and if you're actually getting the SLA or performance that you're expecting, as well as recommendations. So how can we proactively make performance better before a user actually sees a performance impact?

Forecast Network Conditions Impacting Sites

ThousandEyes WAN Insights applies statistical models to Cisco SD-WAN telemetry to produce routing recommendations that forecast potential performance gains for application groups. It follows the SD-WAN configuration for sites, edge routers, and interfaces across IT infrastructure—continuously measuring and assessing the quality at a path level.

Screenshot of ThousandEyes WAN Insights showing SD-WAN policy recommendations based on the quality forecasts for Office 365, Google Workspace, and voice.

Implement SD-WAN Policy Optimizations, Proactively

ThousandEyes WAN Insights uses constant real-time analysis of the underlay and overlay network data to guide the preferred policy recommendations to avoid application experience issues for an application at a given site. These long-term recommendations are specific to each site and application category, and quality estimates reflect the forecasted quality improvement on the recommended path compared to the current path.

Screenshot of ThousandEyes WAN Insights showing site quality over the last week for Office 365.

Take Control Over SD-WAN Utilization

ThousandEyes WAN Insights Capacity Planning gives IT and network operations teams powerful visibility into how different types of traffic or applications are consuming SD-WAN resources across all sites and network devices. Through configurable thresholds, alerts, and an intuitive heat map, teams can proactively identify sites that are at or over capacity and adjust policies or settings to prevent overutilization of SD-WAN circuits.

Screenshot of WAN Insights Capacity Planning heat map

Improve Workforce Experience and IT Operations Efficiency

ThousandEyes WAN Insights empowers network operations and IT teams to seamlessly make policy optimizations through Cisco vManage. WAN Insights organizes data around long-term recommendations based on network quality of service (QoS) levels for loss, latency, and jitter. These quality of service estimates are defined separately for each application class. Network teams can quickly review network issues at problematic sites in order to take proactive measures. With less time spent troubleshooting, IT operations can spend more time advancing strategic business priorities.

Cisco SD-WAN customers with qualified Cisco DNA software licensing tiers can now proactively employ ThousandEyes WAN Insights

Boost Application Experience and Network Performance Like Insight Global

Learn how Insight Global, a national staffing and services company dedicated to empowering people, is able to deliver exceptional application experience and a resilient enterprise network using WAN Insights. Watch as Michael Kutka, Network Architect at Insight Global, shares their story.

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Insight Global Maximizes Network Uptime With WAN Insights

Every organization leverages a network to connect their users, and having the most consistent experience is critical to making sure that an organization functions properly. COVID and everything around that, the migration to hybrid work really impacted us because we weren't able to get the visibility into users and routing over the internet. I'm Michael Kutka. I'm the Network Architect here for Insight Global, and I oversee the implementation of new solutions for the organization. The first time I was introduced to WAN Insights was at Cisco Live. And upon seeing it, I just immediately thought, "Wow, this is a game changer." This can allow us to route around issues that we're seeing in our network. It's going to identify issues in our network. This is going to allow us to spend more time on the strategic efforts that Insight Global wants to accomplish and less time on troubleshooting issues for our end users. Some of the benefits that we've received from WAN Insights is a steep drop-off in tickets from the field and our end users. We've been able to notice a tangible difference in the productivity of our end users. They're able to spend more time working and meeting with our clients instead of troubleshooting issues that may or may not be related to the network. Prior to WAN Insights, we didn't have much visibility into the path quality of our remote offices. After implementing WAN Insights though, we were able to see that some offices had 80, 90% path quality, and we were able to make changes to now get that path quality up to 99%. So with WAN Insights, I'm able to see a path for continuous improvement so that we're always forecasting and making sure that we're choosing the best path from a routing perspective. Right now we're using most of the applications that WAN Insights has built out of the box, which is Office 365, Webex, Zoom, and VoIP for a collaboration experience. Making sure that all of these applications are using the best available path is key in ensuring that our end users have a good user experience. By leveraging WAN Insights to route around issues that we're seeing within our network, and make smart, informed decisions, we're able to make sure that we are running the most efficient and successful network.

Award-winning Innovation. Exceptional Experiences.

ThousandEyes WAN Insights received the 2023 Cloud Computing Product of the Year Award by TMC's Cloud Computing Magazine for its standout innovation.

Learn About Predictive Networks

What is a predictive network?

A predictive network is a network that leverages a predictive analytics process using historical data to forecast future behavior to determine the probability of an issue occurring or reoccurring on that network. Then, the forecast is capable of generating recommendations that, if applied manually or through automation, reduce the probability of the issue ever happening and, therefore, reduce the impact on the user's digital experience.

What is predictive analytics?

Predictive analytics is the application of algorithms applied to a model in an effort to identify the potential of future outcomes based on historical data.

Creating a predictive analytics model involves running different algorithms to identify recurring patterns in sizeable transactional data sets.

While machine learning is not technically a form of predictive analytics, it can be leveraged to enhance a predictive analytics model's ability to detect patterns, forecast outcomes, and recommend actions over time.

Predictive analytics vs. diagnostic analytics

Predictive analytics is forward-looking data analysis that identifies the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data. Diagnostic analytics is reactive and designed to determine changes that occur in a specified period and is typically used retrospectively to understand why an event or trend occurred.

Predictive analytics, as part of SD-WAN

Enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud-based services, such as SaaS applications, which in turn increases reliance on the Internet to deliver WAN traffic. The use of traditional multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) services makes sub-optimal use of costly backhaul WAN bandwidth, given that many critical applications and services are no longer internal in data centers. As a result, enterprises are migrating to hybrid WAN architectures and SD-WAN technology that combines direct Internet access (DIA), IP VPN tunnels, and traditional MPLS circuits.

Over the last several years, a robust market of SD-WAN vendors and managed SD-WAN providers has arisen to meet this need. SD-WAN has been architected to provide a certain amount of resilience, leveraging automated actions. A number of these automated functions are able to track network and path characteristics of the data plane tunnels between SD-WAN devices and use the collected information to compute optimal paths for data traffic, automatically redirecting data traffic to the best available path in the event of an issue occurring. This function, while automatic, remains reactive, only able to initiate the change when conditions deteriorate to the point at which the user's performance is impacted.

Predictive analytics builds on this reactive functionality by taking those characteristics, including packet loss, latency, and jitter, and applying a broad range of statistical time-series methods to predict probabilities of traffic disruption for different applications and use these forecasts to provide recommended path selections to the network, in order to avoid the probable issue occurring and impacting user performance.

Who uses a predictive network?

The goal of the ITOps team for any existing and new site within an SD-WAN network is to provide the best application performance while keeping the circuit cost low. However, the volume of data points across thousands of sites, networks, paths, applications, and users is impossible to assess manually and analyze. As a result, most organizations have a reactive approach to delivering user experience, only focusing on issues as they occur, and are unable to move away from a firefighting mode of operations.

A reduction in the number of incidents and, subsequently, the number of times ITOps has to react to an issue allows them to move beyond a complaint-driven, fire-fighting engagement to a data-driven decision-making process. This facilitates a proactive engagement model that allows network conditions that may otherwise have gone unnoticed to be addressed before they reach a noticeable user-impacting level.

This becomes applicable throughout multiple levels of ITOps, enabling cross-skilling throughout the organization, providing less experienced engineers with enough information to make informed decisions, and ultimately freeing up time for more experienced engineers that can be utilized for strategic actions.

How does a predictive network work?

By continuously observing the behavior of selected applications across every network path over a rolling period, a predictive analytic system is able to analyze historical performance across all SD-WAN network sites and identify quality issues for each application category (for example, Office 365 or Voice).

When the system identifies that a quality issue could be avoided by a change to the current network configuration, it generates a recommendation, typically an alternate path to route that site’s outgoing traffic, for a given application category.

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Featured Blog Posts

Unlocking SD-WAN Value, Explained

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Introducing ThousandEyes WAN Insights

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Why ThousandEyes?

Choose SD-WAN Policies With Confidence

Understand if implemented SD-WAN policies meet business requirements for all locations and applications

Deliver the Ultimate User Experience

See how SD-WAN policy recommendations can measurably improve user experience

Get Better Performance Over Time

Optimize network and application performance over time with a perpetual improvement cycle

Stop reacting to issues and start preventing them.