Choosing the Right SD-WAN App Path

Guaranteeing a reliable application experience for your customers means adopting modern SD-WAN monitoring tools.

Think about it. We are constantly evaluating how to be more efficient in our lives. Especially when we need to get somewhere. Apps nowadays can let us know when it's time to leave for our destination, how long it will take, the most effective route as well as obstacles in our way that could delay our arrival. We rely on these tools now to make our busy lives more manageable.

Today’s enterprises are implementing new tools to help them deliver business-critical applications along the most efficient path as well. SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) technologies promise improved application performance while lowering costs but measuring the performance of how your application is delivered along these new routes is key to successful deployments and happy end users.

What is an SD-WAN application path? Basically, it is simple views into monitoring how your WAN infrastructure is delivering the application experience to your customers compared to your set service level agreements (SLAs).

How does this relate to the apps we use today to get us where we need to go in the most efficient way? Let’s look at a common use case…

Suppose you are a food distributor shipping meat, fish, and wine out to local grocery stores. In order to be successful and have happy customers, you need to evaluate the various routes you could potentially take along with the costs and time it takes to travel those routes to reach your destination for each product.

Figure 1: Shipping over residential roads, the highway, and toll roads all present different costs and hazards to evaluate in order to find the most efficient route to deliver your products to your customers.

Taking residential streets could help you avoid traffic but you have to deal with traffic lights and bumpy roads which will cost you time and money. Highways are a fast route and will save you money but could cost you time in traffic jams. Toll roads will definitely save you time but come with much higher costs.

Sometimes, a successful route to delivery is a combination of different road types and understanding the pros and cons of those combinations compared to the products you are delivering is key to keeping costs down will ensuring happy customers.

The same scenario can be applied to successfully delivering applications over today’s SD-WAN technologies. You need capabilities that enable you to use current and historical network traffic data to compare WAN routes to the business applications you want to deliver over them while helping you understand which SD-WAN conditions are best suited for each of those apps.

Modern network monitoring solutions should enable comprehensive SD-WAN monitoring to ensure that the best possible route is used to deliver an optimal application experience. Vendor solutions should offer detailed geography mapping of WAN infrastructure with tunnel statistics offering inventory, packet loss, latency, and jitter as well as historical analysis for trending conditions like when a specific SD-WAN tunnel is more appropriate for application delivery during certain hours of the day.

In the above scenario, you can think of your applications as the meat, fish, and wine we want to deliver to the grocery stores; the SD-WAN application path as the route to delivery this food; and the advanced monitoring metrics as the data you need to evaluate for the best possible route to take to deliver your products at the lowest cost.

Figure 2: SD-WAN Application Path monitoring and analytics enables successful enterprise application delivery at the lowest cost to ensure a reliable end-user experience.

Whether you're delivering food out to hundreds of grocery stores or critical applications to tens of thousands of customers, you need an easy way to get relevant data to evaluate and select the best possible path to deliver your products and services while continually lowering costs — all while meeting your SLAs.

It’s that easy because, in the end, we all want happy customers.

Watch the CA NetOps SD-WAN Monitoring Video Series here.