Using Analytics with Your SD-WAN for Precision Fine-Tuning

Introduction

Given the speed with which global events impact networks and businesses worldwide — you being no exception, in your fast-paced digital world — there is little room left for connectivity issues, security breaches or a badly performing network. In response, Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) has become a critical technology to accomplish that. But doing a mere SD-WAN deployment is not enough. To get the most out of SD-WAN, continuous monitoring and optimization with SD-WAN analytics are very important. This is the need for businesses who rent their firewalls, servers and routers — you will absolutely require SD-WAN analytics to keep traffic outside your main network as much under control. This blog post would introduce to us the use of SD-WAN analytics for continuous refinements and performance improvement.

Importance of Analytics

In modern network management, a single application for acquiring and utilizing data is unfeasible without access to comprehensive monitoring solutions. They will dive deeper into network performance, where the networks are currently inefficient and may pose a security risk, as well in those areas that need improvement. By periodically looking at different attributes of the network, business can take intelligent decisions that improve efficiency and deliver quality service (QoS), cost effectively. One of the use cases I have seen from many large enterprise customers has been using analytics to achieve better visibility into how a network appliance like firewall, server or specify router is performing within their networking estate so that they maximize their ROI instead of upgrading and replacing hardware.

Benefits of SD-WAN Analytics:

• Performance Monitoring: Real-time information regarding network performance metrics that includes bandwidth utilization, latency and packet loss.
• Security Insights: Detection of abnormal traffic behavior indicative of a security breach.
• Cost Management: Analyze data usage for optimal bandwidth and reduce costs.
• User Experience: Performance stats let you optimize the app to create a smooth user experience.
• Proactive Maintenance: The ability to identify potential issues/bugs before they interrupt.

SD-WAN Analytics Tools

So, how does an enterprise get the most out of SD-WAN analytics data when it requires dedicated tools to collect and manage such large-scale network information? And, by doing so they get visual dashboards and automated reports with real-time alerts to take data-driven decisions more quicker.

SD-WAN Analytics with Key SD-WAN Features:

• Dashboard and Visualization: Solutions like VMware vRealize or Cisco vManage have a rich set of dashboards that provide the visualization layer on real-time network performance.
• Automated Alerts: Such as Silver Peak Unity Orchestrator, tools can issue automated alerts when performance anomalies or security threats detect timely intervention.
• Historical Data Analysis: Solutions such as Fortinet FortiManager help organizations to analyze historical data and allow for long-term performance trends.
• Integration Capabilities: The tools can be integrated with other network management solutions to provide a complete view of the whole networking infrastructure.
• Custom Reports: Custom email reports focused on specific metrics you care about like app performance or security vulnerabilities.

Optimization Techniques

With the right tools available, the next step is to take advantage of this data and use it to tune your SD-WAN for optimal behavior. There are a few methodologies that can be used astutely:

1. Traffic Prioritization

Leverage SD-WAN analytics to identify important applications and prioritize their traffic. Take, for example, VoIP services this is a VoIP service and required to be prioritized more as compared to video conferencing or ERP system.

Steps:

• Identify: Use analytics tools to identify the applications that are consuming bandwidth most often.
• Classify/Tag: Apply business tags to applications.
• Prioritize: Establish SD-WAN policies to prioritize important applications.

2. Bandwidth Management

Dynamic bandwidth allocation with real-time utilization. The same analytics may inform when or where you are wasting bandwidth, and optimize its use dynamically.

Steps:

• Track: Track bandwidth usage site-by-site.
• Align: Rebalance bandwidth according to what the business is doing today, stopping wastage.
• Planning: Plan your bandwidth management around peak times of usage and critical applications.

3. Security Fine-Tuning

Use this security analytics to further tune your firewall rules, intrusion detection systems and other existing security measures. Additionally, any kind of peculiarity in traffic should ring a bell, might be hacker attack so immediate measures need to be taken.

Steps:

• Detect: Monitor traffic for abnormal patterns.
• Analyze: Use analytics to track the source and nature of potential threats.
• Respond: Retake security actions and rules to decrease the risks discovered.

4. Performance Optimization

Leverage both historical and real-time data to improve the performance of your entire SD-WAN, including latency, data throughput and packet loss requirements.

Steps:

• Analyze: Unearth performance bottleneck using real-time and past data.
• Adjust: Refine network settings for better performance.
• Test: Run daily performance tests to validate that optimizations are working.

5. Application Visibility

Analytics tools are also useful in getting deep insights into how applications behave within the network. Do so by analyzing this data and determining failing apps to correct it.

Steps:

• Monitor: Keep a record of the performance.
• Diagnosis: Uncover underlying reasons performance is low.
• Optimize: Modify App Delivery settings to optimize the delivery of applications.

6. Proactive Maintenance

Apply predictive analytics to predict network failure and prevent it from happening. This is especially helpful for rented equipment so that maintenance can be done in a scheduled manner before it turns into an issue.

Steps:

• Predict: Use analytics to predict possible hardware or software failures.
• Prevent: Proactively maintain the weak areas that have been identified.
• Update: Keep firmware and software up-to-date.

Conclusion

With SD-WAN analytics being used correctly, the network performance and security of businesses that rent firewalls, servers or even routers can be greatly improved. Specialty analytics tools and advanced optimization techniques help you build a robust, efficient network infrastructure. This approach not only makes operation more efficient, but also contributes to better user experience because response time in some milestones are important and saves costs as a bonus (especially the traffic between your sites where high resilient network is paid for link by pack or over volume signed with CDN provider).

Plugging in SD-WAN analytics into your network infrastructure strategy gives an insight that helps you stay ahead of any issues, tune resource usage and make sure rented hardware provides optimum performance. It is a programmatic way of thinking and it resonates with the evolving requirement modern businesses are demanding, presenting SD-WAN analytics as a must-have technology for real-time optimization.