SD-WAN Performance Monitoring

Real-time Visibility for SD-WAN Deployments

Enterprises are increasingly leveraging cloud-based applications and embracing the mobility of a growing distributed workforce. As evolving business needs have dramatically expanded to include software as a service (SaaS) and cloud, the prospect of rising transport costs and suboptimal application performance is driving enterprises to move to wide area networks (WANs) that are software-defined, Internet-centric, and architected for optimal interconnection with cloud and external services.

A software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) can help make enterprise networks cloud ready, more cost-efficient, and better suited to delivering quality digital experiences to customers and employees. However, ensuring that an SD-WAN delivers on expectations requires a modern approach to monitoring that addresses network visibility and application performance equally well.

Simple edge-to-edge performance monitoring is no longer enough. Today’s IT and network operation teams need correlated visibility into network underlay and overlay paths and performance metrics, web servers, end-user experience, and application-layer performance, as well as routing issues and Internet outages. ThousandEyes uniquely offers an unmatched set of vantage points to meet the full spectrum of planning and operational visibility needs to help you ensure WAN performance and empower the employee and customer digital experience.

Visualization of the Modern WAN

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Visualization of the Modern WAN Video Transcript

Hello.

My name is Bart Jan Menkveld, and I'm a senior solution engineer at ThousandEyes, and today I'm going to show you how we can help you to move to the modern WAN.

But before we move to the modern WAN, let me draw out for you how the current WAN looks like.

I'll start with the HQ here on top: HQ.

We might have a data center over here: DC.

We might have a branch of this over here, and I'll throw in another branch just for good fun.

These locations, of course, are connected among each other, and they are connected with things like MPLS, maybe some EVPN, maybe even some IPsec VPN.

Doesn't really matter. They are connected in a controlled way.

One good thing about most of these technologies is they do give you an SLA and actually somebody to blame if something goes wrong.

The downside is pretty simple. They're quite expensive.

Another thing we all probably heard about is the Internet.

So, I'm going to draw the Internet very schematic as we always do, in between.

And for the people who think this is a realistic way of looking at the Internet, you couldn't be more wrong.

Actually, if I continue drawing, this looks a bit more like what the Internet really looks like.

A big interconnected network of a lot of networks with a best-effort SLA between them.

So, this is the current network that we're doing.

SLAs on your wide area network and a best-effort network in between wherever you are moving some applications. For example, O365 or SFDC (salesforce.com).

But with the modern WAN, we say we're going to get rid of all these dedicated lines and we're going to move them towards the Internet.

So, on drawing, people think it looks like this.

Reality again is not that simple.

So, the first thing we usually do when we talk about the modern WAN, we want to do some baseline.

So, what we do is base an agent in each of your locations and we will simulate the user from that location, so we will walk around the WAN to see how many DC applications perform.

We will go over the Internet, see how cloud applications perform, so we have a baseline.

So, we know how a user experience looks like.

And when we start removing the lines from the Internet, from the direct lines, and when we start moving those across the Internet, you can actually follow by our unique measurements what the exact path looks like.

Is it direct or is it actually a very strange path? And we can measure that.

We can report on that.

So, you know what the user experience is after you move to the modern WAN with SD-WAN.

So if it's better, you're fine.

You know if it's done a good job.

But if it's not, you can troubleshoot or you can even change out your providers.

If you want to find out more, please go to thousandeyes.com.

Why Now for SD-WAN Monitoring?

Enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud-based services, such as SaaS applications, which in turn increases reliance on the Internet to deliver WAN traffic. 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. 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 risen to meet this need. Analysts predict that adoption of SD-WAN solutions and associated network monitoring capabilities will become nearly ubiquitous as enterprises refresh their branch office routers over time.

Enterprises are migrating to hybrid WAN architectures and SD-WAN technology to save on replacing traditional MPLS circuits

Comprehensive Visibility for WAN Transformation

ThousandEyes uniquely offers an unmatched set of vantage points to meet the full spectrum of planning and operational visibility needed by ITOps teams to assure WAN performance. With ThousandEyes, you can stay on top of employee and customer digital experience using correlated, continuous, and granular network performance data. Plus, ThousandEyes Internet and cloud intelligence has been natively integrated into Cisco SD-WAN Routing Platforms, enabling end-to-end visibility from WAN edge to all critical areas of your business—so you can deliver an optimal digital experience for every user to any application over any network.

SD-WAN monitoring offers a set of vantage points to meet the operational visibility needs for ensuring WAN performance

Enterprise Agents

Enterprise Agents are deployed in enterprise campuses, branch offices, hubs, virtual private clouds, and virtual networks to monitor WAN connectivity to the cloud and SaaS applications. They provide visibility into underlay performance between SD-WAN nodes or cloud-based security gateways, overlay performance and policy routing, and performance monitoring between branch and SaaS/internal applications—offering a comprehensive monitoring solution.

Cloud Agents

Cloud Agents are pre-deployed and are connected to Tier 1, 2, and 3 ISPs, broadband service providers, and regional data centers of major cloud providers. Use Cloud Agents to compare ISP performance for branch and site connectivity, to baseline local SaaS application performance, or to evaluate reachability and customer digital experience over the Internet.

INTERNET INSIGHTS™

Internet Insights uses collective intelligence to detect Internet outages, and can be used to correlate WAN performance to macro Internet issues, to quickly communicate issues to customers, and to work with service providers for effective troubleshooting and problem remediation.

Softcat is renowned for outstanding customer service and a wide range of IT services. As it shifted to a remote, cloud-based work model, it encountered challenges in monitoring network health and performance across its global locations. To address this, Softcat implemented ThousandEyes, which provided crucial insights for proactive incident management. This strategic shift allowed the company to anticipate and address service issues before they became major problems.

Read the Case Study

ThousandEyes SD-WAN Visibility in Action

Assure sound readiness audits, architecture planning, and deployment, as well as efficient operations, with insight into end-to-end SD-WAN underlay and overlay performance with visibility from ThousandEyes.

Read the Transcript

SD-WAN Visibility Video Transcript

Today's digital leaders are looking to SD-WAN to make their enterprise networks more cost-efficient, cloud-ready, and capable of delivering better digital experiences to customers and employees.

But ensuring that SD-WAN delivers on expectations requires a modern approach to monitoring that addresses both network visibility and application performance equally well.

That's why businesses trust ThousandEyes to ensure their SD-WAN rollouts are a success.

ThousandEyes gives you visibility from the very start of your SD-WAN journey.

Use our 350+ global vantage points and Enterprise Agents to start baselining your application and network performance even before you start your rollout.

Once you start targeting branch sites, you can use ThousandEyes to measure ISP performance to key SaaS providers, evaluate branch readiness, and quickly resolve provider and Internet issues before you even pull the go-live trigger.

ThousandEyes can uncover key insights.

You may find your broadband ISP actually performs more consistently than your high-cost MPLS line.

Or you may find that your regional provider is not properly routing packets to your data center.

This kind of insight isn't possible with traditional monitoring or vendor SD-WAN dashboards.

Once deployed, ThousandEyes provides powerful reports and dashboards for key stakeholders, so you can showcase the performance of applications across your entire SD-WAN fabric, easily identify network issues, and highlight how SD-WAN has improved service delivery.

SD-WAN is application-centric, so your monitoring needs to correlate network performance directly with application performance.

With full browser synthetics, ThousandEyes gives you a complete picture of end user SaaS and on-prem application performance.

And with more of your network riding on the Internet, you're exposed to issues that would otherwise be outside your control.

ThousandEyes gives you visibility not just of the entire SD-WAN fabric, but also end-to-end, hop-by-hop visibility of the entire underlay, every transit provider to every cloud and SaaS from every branch location.

This means you can identify exactly where an ISP might be underperforming, how it's impacting application performance, and quickly escalate and resolve issues.

To find out how ThousandEyes can ensure your SD-WAN rollout is a success, go to thousandeyes.com/sd-wan.

Why ThousandEyes?

Readiness Through Operations

Use performance metrics to make architecture decisions, select providers, establish SLAs, to identify root causes and effectively resolve service performance issues.

Comprehensive Vantage Points

See from endpoint devices for remote workers, internal networks for branches, and regional Internet locations for rapid MTTI.

Multilayer Correlation

Understand underlay and overlay and how metrics such as jitter, latency, and packet loss, relate toweb servers, user experience, app-layer performance, as well as Internet outages.

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SD-WAN Monitoring

Real-time Visibility for SD-WAN Deployments