WAN Insights Introductory Tour, Part 2

This page is a continuation of the WAN Insights Introductory Tour, Part 1. In the previous session we reviewed the overall structure of a recommendation and the top timeline of the Recommendation Detail modal. Now we will review traffic distribution, and then drill down to review specific endpoint pairs.

Review Egress Traffic Distribution

The Egress Traffic Distribution chart shows the hourly throughput distribution broken out by each available interface (circuit). For any poorly performing circuits, you can see how much traffic is being routed across those interfaces.

Review the Throughput by Circuit

The Throughput & Quality Analysis timeline allows you to correlate quality drops with bandwidth utilization. For example, if you already know that a site is experiencing quality degradation, and you know which circuit is bad, you can now review whether quality fluctuations coincide with changes in bandwidth utilization.

Throughput data is only available for cEdge routers. See Enabling WAN Insights for more information on supported SD-WAN software versions.

Scroll Down to Site Endpoint Pairs

To start, scroll down past the timeline on the Recommendation Detail modal until you see the Site Endpoint-Pairs section immediately below. Initially, nothing is selected, so you are seeing a graph showing all the endpoint pairs for this site. Endpoints shown here are routers located at a network site.

The graph is titled Quality Improvement per Endpoint-Pair. There are two views: a radial view (shown) and a stacked view. In the radial view:

Source routers are shown in the center in gray. If there is more than one, the gray circle will be divided. Destination routers are shown in the ring immediately outside the source. They are proportionally different based on the number of active users at this site. A larger bar means more users are impacted, and thus that particular endpoint-pair might be worth investigating further. Color coding uses green for better quality, blue for worse quality. The percent improvement is shown as a bar extending out from each destination router. So, at a glance you can tell which endpoint pairs (paths) have the most potential for improvement, and also which ones are impacting the greatest number of users.

You can hover over any screen element to see further details.

Next, we’ll choose a pair of endpoints and drill down to the level of raw measures.

Choose an Endpoint Pair to Study

Click an endpoint either in the list on the right, or in the graph in the center. The screen changes to show details for just that pair of endpoints.

This portion of the modal shows the following:

The timeline now shows data for just the selected pair of endpoints. Below the timeline is an area called Hourly quality of circuits, color-coded by quality. Green is better quality, red is worse. Note the circuits can connect across interfaces as shown in the Circuit composition to the right. The colors used to indicate the circuits themselves are a visual convenience and are not related to the circuit color names.

Review Hourly Quality of Circuits

What can you do with the Hourly Quality of Circuits? You can correlate the timeline with the hourly circuit quality and see which circuit is causing the most problems, for this pair of endpoints.

Review Throughput for Selected Endpoint Pair

The Throughput & Quality Analysis timeline is repeated, this time showing just the application traffic volumes for the selected pair of endpoints.

Throughput data is only available for cEdge routers. See Enabling WAN Insights for more information on supported SD-WAN software versions.

Review Loss, Latency, and Jitter

After isolating a particular circuit, you can scroll down to see the loss, latency, and jitter performance. The bottom of the screen has separate graphs for each of these core measures. Within each graph, the performance of each circuit is shown color-coded to match the circuits in the Hourly Quality of Circuits.

In this way you can identify the problem circuits, and also see which measures are problematic on those circuits. You can use this information to evaluate the reliability of the recommendation, and decide whether to take action.

Follow Through on a Recommendation

After reviewing the performance details in WAN Insights, one possible next step would be to apply this recommendation. If you have administrator permissions as described in Adding and Managing WAN Insights Users, you’ll see a Request to Apply button on the recommendation detail screen. See Applying WAN Insights Recommendations for how-to steps.