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Network Infrastructure Magazine | Friday, March 26, 2021
SD-WAN routers use passive application performance monitoring. While this monitoring level is necessary for an SD-WAN router to make routing decisions across its various network links, it does not provide an accurate measurement of end-user experience from an application and end-to-end standpoint.
FREMONT, CA: It is usually easier to set up and operate a Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) deployment than it is to use legacy networking technologies. The reason for this is that software-defined networks come pre-configured with programmatically efficient configurations and do not require network engineering expertise. SD-WAN, like any new technology, has its drawbacks. Network engineers who have implemented SD-WAN solutions at remote branch offices are often heard saying that they are dealing with the following issues:
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Split Tunneling Dismantles Centralized Monitoring
SD-WAN incorporates a split tunnel. A remote site has a direct broadband connection to the Internet and a private connection to intranet resources in a split tunnel configuration. A VPN tunnel or a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) connection is used to create a private connection between the branch router and the company's data center. With this configuration, centralized network monitoring solutions cannot detect problems with reachability or application performance degradation experienced by users at remote sites. Because the tracking server is located in the data center, this is the case.
Engineers Can Be Ignorant to The End-User Experience
Prioritize mission-critical data and optimize routing decisions to identify and profile the applications that traverse their interfaces. SD-WAN routers use passive application performance monitoring. While this monitoring level is necessary for an SD-WAN router to make routing decisions across its various network links, it does not provide an accurate measurement of end-user experience from an application and end-to-end standpoint. It is impossible to capture the end-user experience and implement SL without end-to-end metrics from the user layer, like network latency, packet loss, DNS resolution time, and HTTP loading time.
Performance Problems Can Be Difficult to Troubleshoot
Assume a wireless user in a remote location complains about the slowness of the network. How do you begin troubleshooting this issue? If it is a network issue, many things might be to blame, including the WiFi network, the LAN, the client itself, the SD-WAN appliance's setup, and the WAN/Internet links. SD-WAN solutions provide useful data and analytics on the traffic that passes through their interfaces.
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