WAN Insights Technical Overview

ThousandEyes WAN Insights takes raw telemetry data from vAnalytics and uses this data to continuously observe the behavior of every network path over a rolling period of 7 days.

WAN Insights will start to become effective once vAnalytics has been active for 7 days or more and you have configured application profiles such as Office 365 or Webex. You will see quality of service graphs for each path. This historical data will be used to generate recommendations.

If WAN Insights sees a quality issue and sees an opportunity for you to improve that quality by changing which paths and interfaces are used, it generates a recommendation. Recommendations are made at a site level, by application category, using quality thresholds that reflect the requirements of each application category.

For example, on one site you might have Voice traffic routed over a path identified in vManage as private1, while all other traffic goes over another circuit called biz-internet. Note that changes are recommended at a site level, while actual quality is measured at a path level, between two routers.

Note: vManage uses the term “Color” as a logical abstraction to identify individual WAN transport tunnels connecting to a WAN Edge device. The color names are pre-defined, and include the following: 3g, biz-internet, blue, bronze, custom1, custom2, custom3, default, gold, green, lte, metro-ethernet, mpls, private1, private2, private3, private4, private5, private6, public-internet, red, and silver.

If WAN Insights determines that an issue exists at a site level, and is likely to continue in the future, it suggests an alternate path to route that site’s outgoing traffic, for a given application category.

Additional features include capacity planning and alerts. WAN Insights’ capacity planning feature allows users to define thresholds to highlight areas where bandwidth is close to saturation. These thresholds can be tuned to provide lead time for increasing capacity which could involve ordering a new circuit or changing to a new carrier.