How to Activate ThousandEyes WAN Insights

WAN Insights can be activated by an SD-WAN administrator user who is logged in to vAnalytics at the time of activation. You can be one of these three types of user in vAnalytics:

  • vAnalytics Admin

  • Smart Account Admins attached to this vAnalytics instance

  • Virtual Account Admins attached to this vAnalytics instance

See Customer Eligibility for licensing information.

You must be logged into vAnalytics directly as a user with a valid email address defined. If you are logged into vManage using local authentication, the WAN Insights activation process is not supported. The solution is to log into vAnalytics directly.

Step 1: Prepare in vManage

Ensure that your Cisco SD-WAN is up and running, with vAnalytics enabled, as described in Supported SD-WAN Software Versions. If you don’t already have vAnalytics enabled, you’ll need to open a TAC case with Cisco support: https://mycase.cloudapps.cisco.com/case. See the Cisco vAnalytics page section titled “Onboarding Cisco vAnalytics” for more information.

Take the time now to review the application classes and SLA thresholds that you have currently configured in vManage for Application-Aware Routing (AAR) as described in the SD-WAN documentation Configure Application-Aware Routing Policies Using Cisco vManage. Remove duplicate or overlapping entries (same application appears in multiple lists) before activating WAN Insights.

You’ll need to set up Application-Aware Routing (AAR) in vManage for the applications that you want to monitor in WAN Insights.

Step 2: Activate WAN Insights

In vAnalytics, click the button called Activate WAN Insights. Activation initiates onboarding of the SD-WAN network that is linked to your vAnalytics, and brings the historical data from vAnalytics into ThousandEyes WAN Insights. Activation includes the following:

Enabling WAN Insights features in your vAnalytics UI so that you can view recommendations from either platform. Setting up a ThousandEyes organization, which gives you access to the full WAN Insights functionality available within ThousandEyes UI

Whatever user credentials you’re using in vAnalytics will be added to this ThousandEyes organization as an Organization Admin in ThousandEyes. For example if your vAnalytics username is 123@gmail.com, that username is provisioned in ThousandEyes with WAN Insights enabled.

A status message indicates whether WAN Insights account activation was successful.

If the activation is successful, you’ll receive an email with details on how to set up a ThousandEyes account. If activation fails, follow the vAnalytics instruction and open a TAC case as described in Getting Support for WAN Insights.

Check your email inbox for an invitation, using the email address associated with your vAnalytics user account. This invitation expires in 48 hours, so don’t wait too long. Click the redirect link inside the email invitation, which takes you to ThousandEyes.

A second email confirmation is sent when WAN Insights is fully ready for use, and recommendations have had time to populate.

Please note the following:

  • You’ll have to wait 48 hours to allow your vAnalytics telemetry data to populate in WAN Insights.

  • If you haven’t used vAnalytics before, WAN Insights needs 7 days’ worth of data in order to generate initial recommendations.

  • WAN Insights data is available in both the ThousandEyes platform and in vAnalytics.

Step 3: Log In to ThousandEyes

On app.thousandeyes.com as a first-time user you’ll see a login dialog asking you to set up a password. After you specify a password, you’ll be able to access the ThousandEyes platform.

Step 4: Add Business-Critical Applications in WAN Insights

Once you’re logged in to ThousandEyes and can see WAN Insights on the navigation menu, go to the Recommendations screen and click + Add new application to make your own business-critical applications and their associated recommendations visible in WAN Insights.

In WAN Insights, you’ll see applications which have an Application-Aware Routing (AAR) policy already configured in vManage. On first sign-on, the applications that display initially are the default out-of-the-box application configurations from vManage for categories such as Voice. If you have you have additional applications configured with an existing AAR policy set up, but you don’t see the application in the WAN Insights Activate a new application modal dialog, you might have to update your AAR policy in vManage in order to trigger a data push to WAN Insights.

Note that you might have to wait a day or so for application and threshold changes to propagate, and if you’ve never used vAnalytics before, you’ll need up to 7 days of historical data to generate recommendations.

See Adding Business-Critical Applications to WAN Insights for more information.

You need the Administer WAN Insights permission to add an application in WAN Insights.

Step 5: Ensure Capacity Data

If you want to use the WAN Insights Capacity Planning feature, ensure that maximum bandwidth is specified for every WAN interface in your network where you want to use this feature. You can ingest this data into WAN Insights in a number of ways:

  • Inherit from vManage. If your SD-WAN already has up-to-date maximum bandwidth data for all interfaces for which you wish to monitor capacity, you don’t have to do anything, as this data is automatically ingested into WAN Insights. See vManage documentation on Configure Network Interfaces. Capacity data is updated every 24 hours from vManage.

  • Manually enter or edit capacity settings in WAN Insights. See Manage Capacity Data. You can also use WAN Insights to bulk upload maximum bandwidth capacity settings in a CSV file – this feature also lets you download current settings, edit the file, and upload the changes back into WAN Insights. (Note that updated capacity settings in WAN Insights do not propagate back to vManage.)

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