What Is WAN Insights?

WAN Insights is a predictive network optimization tool that uses a statistical model to examine historical data from your Cisco SD-WAN, in order to find the best paths for application traffic.

WAN Insights looks back 7 days to see which paths your application traffic flows were using, how those paths compared to other available paths within your network, and then generates long-term recommendations for paths that would reduce the probability of experiencing an SLA violation (i.e., low-quality performance).

Even if you aren’t experiencing actual SLA violations, WAN Insights can detect when you’re coming close to violating your quality thresholds, and recommend better paths – as long as those paths already exist within your own network. The focus is on sustained improvement over a longer period of time, rather than on temporary moment-to-moment fixes. WAN Insights continuously monitors your network and issues recommendations whenever a better path is available. Think of this as an insurance policy.

An intuitive series of roll-ups and drill-downs helps you understand how each of the network paths between your sites is impacting overall application performance. You can also review bandwidth utilization on individual circuits to investigate high traffic as a cause of poor quality.

WAN Insights only generates recommendations if it can identify a better path within your own network. A “better path” is one that, based on historical data, is more likely to provide a better application experience for end users. WAN Insights recommendations help you to choose the best available path for your application traffic.

WAN Insights extends the value of your existing SD-WAN by adding a long-term, proactive viewpoint. Cisco’s SD-WAN policy engines are designed to react quickly to network issues. However, in a purely reactive system, user experience may start to noticeably degrade before the policy engine can respond, or you might see frequent network changes. WAN Insights adds forecasting capabilities to ensure that the traffic is already flowing over the most optimal set of paths.

The daily users of WAN Insights are network engineers, net-ops, and IT services teams that are responsible for managing enterprise networks and infrastructure, and teams responsible for ensuring a smooth user experience when using business-critical SaaS applications such as Salesforce or Cisco Webex.