Why Use WAN Insights?

The previous page describes the WAN Insights value-add. But why is predictive network optimization so important? One driver is the urgency of keeping enterprise business users connected and productive in a global, hybrid workplace. With connectivity moving to the cloud and to the public Internet, SD-WAN teams may encounter reported problems with end-user application performance, even when their own network device and VPN metrics seem normal.

WAN Insights helps enterprise network teams to manage the end-user experience within their own networks. With WAN Insights, network teams can proactively detect and address major issues, before users start to complain about it.

Having detailed path-level visibility is particularly important because end users can’t always distinguish between application and network issues when they’re reporting problems. They might notice that a particular business application seems slower than normal, but they don’t know what to do about it. This is why network teams need an intelligent, application-centric view of their network that accurately shows trends impacting their end users across all their enterprise sites, for a given application.

WAN Insights organizes data around long-term recommendations based on network quality of service (QoS) levels for loss, latency, and jitter. These quality of service estimates are defined separately for each application class. Network teams can quickly review problematic sites in order to take proactive measures.

For example, you can use WAN Insights to:

• Establish network performance baselines that are tied to user application traffic

• Optimize network configurations and formulate better network policies

• Compare different providers and agree on service-level agreements

• Review bandwidth utilization and traffic volumes, and correlate with specific applications

• Quickly isolate and remediate poorly performing circuits