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AppNeta: SD-WAN & End User Experience
1. SD-WAN & End User
Experience:
The Case of the Missing Metrics
Cisco Live
June 2019
2. Quick Poll
● How many of you are in some stage of planning for an SD-
WAN deployment?
● How many of you currently have SD-WAN in their network?
● How many of you can’t deploy SD-WAN in your network at all?
● Putting SD-WAN aside, who has multiple connections from
the branch in their architecture?
6. Network
Paths
Packets
Web/URLFlows
100% capture of the
actual data from the
packets on the network
Web synthetics to
baseline performance
as it changes over time
An active approach to
measuring health and
availability of the network
Who, when, and what
application traffic is
active on the network
4D
4-Dimensional Monitoring
7. Network
Paths
Packets
Web/URLFlows
100% capture of the
actual data from the
packets on the network
Web synthetics to
baseline performance as
it changes over time
An active approach to
measuring health and
availability of the network
Who, when, and what
application traffic is
active on the network
4-Dimensional Monitoring
13. Network
Paths
Packets
Web/URLFlows
100% capture of the
actual data from the
packets on the network
Web synthetics to
baseline performance
as it changes over time
An active approach to
measuring health and
availability of the network
Who, when, and what
application traffic is
active on the network
4D
4-Dimensional Monitoring
22. Summary
● 4 dimensions of monitoring, we looked at 2
(active)
● Apps are moving, analyze right from where
customers are - check out other presentations
● What's important to measure
● Please come discuss any questions or deep
dive with us
23. Thanks for Sticking Around
Giveaway happening now!
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Editor's Notes
Hi everybody, thank you for taking time out of your busy conference schedule to spend the next 10 minutes or so joining us for a quick discussion on a topic that for many may be top of mind: SD-WAN
SD-WAN, you all must be hearing that term everywhere, around every corner, every newsletter and webinar invite.
We won’t spend too much time talking about all the possible technical details you may encounter, more broadly we engage on the timing of SD-WAN, what business’ are looking to achieve with branch transformation, and what you might all be thinking about in terms of understanding End User Experience - and if not that - at least how you might adapt your monitoring strategy for some level of service assurance during transformation.
I will then show you some of the key insights you can achieve with AppNeta, as we discuss challenges in understanding EUE before, during, and after branch transformation with SD-WAN.
I’d like to start with a quick poll, simply by a show of hands.
Who is either in pilot or planning a pilot of SD-WAN?
Who already has SD-WAN deployed partially or fully deployed?
Who has existing architecture, security posture, governance policy, or any other reason why SD-WAN is not currently on the radar?
Putting SD-WAN aside for a moment, who has some mixture of DIA, MPLS, shared internet, point to point from the branch to the Data Center or Cloud based apps?
Remark on the %
Certainly there is evidence that network connectivity is more and more commoditized, however, we don’t believe this is the main driver for transformation of connectivity at the branch, although it may be in part. Networks exist to deliver applications, and we see the most dramatic shift here - many enterprises are moving to a ‘zero data center model’ or adopting more and more SaaS applications to drive their business, and a major focal point of this branch transformation is to get users closer to the applications that now exist in the cloud - but still maintain the ability to policy, manage, measure (more on that later), and adapt to changing application architectures.
Let’s play some SD-WAN Bingo.
Can anyone in the group start naming some terms they hear flying around, or concepts related to SD-WAN?
I am going to stick to just a few core concepts, even though there more - perhaps of paramount benefit is centralized policy and management - but we are going go stick to a few of the concepts that you come into contact with when End Users Experience applications
We introduce methods of transit across the network which are possibly dynamic. We introduce methods of prioritization which align with business critical apps, and we leverage connectivity potentially across many providers
So you have these core concepts as they pertain to End User Experience - what do we need to measure? What is challenging to measure?
Many SD-WAN solutions include some facility to measure - this is true, and varies by the solution.
We will get into some of the key insights provided by the AppNeta Performance Manager with some direct examples - but before we get into details, id like to mention more broadly a benefit before you even get started.
What apps are users actually using?
What is End User Experience right now, before introduce SD-WAN?
Once deployed, how does it compare to pre-deployment performance?
Here’s how AppNeta does it.
instrumentation - show device!
Here’s how AppNeta does it.
You may me actively monitoring many possible paths to various services used at the branch, lets start with a simple example and examine connectivity between a branch and data center where there multiple possible transits you may take to get from A to B
Here you see a filtered view showing us the real time active synthetic testing of two possible underlay transits between branch and DC, and the synthetic testing of the active overlay.
Extending on this a bit, the AppNeta Performance Manager continuously measures and records route data experienced on the path. This allows AppNeta to provide meaningful insight into path connectivity and routing - especially across the public internet where there is the highest likelihood of volatility. This allows the operator to visualize changes to path routing over time, and quickly identify all network segments involved.
In addition to layer 3 per-hop insight, we can represent this information by provider network as well, mapping IP prefix information to the autonomous system number and provider responsible. This gives a consolidated view of the networks involved and how they change, a record over time which can easily be shared with service providers when performance issues are experienced.
Here’s how AppNeta does it.
Remember this view? Instead of looking at branch to DC connectivity, in this case we are going to actively monitor performance to SaaS or Cloud Based applications across the 2 possible transit networks. For our example, we are using Sharepoint, but as we get into views pertaining to web synthetics, it can be any web application either home-grown or off the shelf.
Lets drill in to the real-time metrics for one of these two paths. Here we see a real-time, minute by minute view of the metrics I mentioned earlier. It is here we can visualize the network performance, identify issues, and use thresholds to automatically trigger events when degraded network conditions are present.
Part of the automated response when issues are detected, is to create events used for alerting and reporting - but more tactically, to run a more intensive diagnostic at that moment to help identify and isolate where the condition was introduced across a path you may or may not control. This is another means of record keeping a snapshot of the path details at the point in time when performance was impacted.
Let’s build on this groundwork of network insight and transition to a similar context, but now metrics driven through web synthetics instead of network synthetics. These synthetics are just like a user sitting at a browser and logging in to a business critical application. This is done by means of a chrome browser resident on the Monitoring Point, and a scripted transaction based on popular selenium actions.
With a click we can compare performance across branches, but in this example we are easily comparing performance across the two possible transits. The Blue line being Comcast and the Orange line being Wicked Bandwidth. You will noticed that we are not just measuring the overall transaction, but each step we take in our scripted transaction which we call milestones.
Lets have a closer look at this by checking out the real time web metrics of the Comcast path. Here we can see a breakdown of the overall transaction by Network, Server, and Browser - the aim being to help readily identify if delays are due to the network or application. As in our network synthetic examples, we also can set thresholds on various conditions like HTTP errorrs, transaction time, script errors, and more.
In addition to the high level breakdown of Network/Server/Browser we are actively measuring each step we take in the application (or milestone) and can similarly set thresholds for certain critical components of the application workflow, an example might be a Single Sign On element of the overall end user experience.
We spoke of the various ways the platform helps provide insight at the branch to End User Experience by means of both a synthetic and passive analysis approach. We only discussed the active synthetic testing, however the traffic analysis also has a role to play in this use case. For more on that, we have a few quick chats happening at the booth which dive more closely into our traffic analysis capability.
We discussed as well that there are many drivers for branch transformation, but the biggest seems to be the shifting landscape of where applications live. With an approach like ours, you can be sure to always be measuring from where your users are, before during and after changes to where apps live OR how they are delivered.
We invite you to discuss in more detail any thoughts or questions you may have related to branch transformation, or more specifically SD-WAN - and of course we are all here to help give you closer look at the platform and provide any further detail you may need about our technology. Or, just come by and say hello and introduce yourself.
I and the entire AppNeta team here want to thank you for your valuable time here at the conference,we hope everyone has a great show and enjoy the rest of your day.
