It’s no secret that delivering a quality user experience is top of mind for today’s IT pros. But your environment is changing. Traditional networking approaches are inefficient, expensive, and hard to scale in an increasingly cloud-based world. Today’s applications and infrastructure environments are more diverse than ever. They may be distributed across data centers and multiple clouds, on many different network connections.
To gain the control and flexibility they need, many organizations are implementing software-defined WAN overlays, such as VMware SD-WAN™. VMware SD-WAN helps you simplify WAN management, get assured application performance, and acts as a managed on-ramp to the cloud. But to really get the most out of your SD-WAN investment, you need full visibility across all your infrastructure environments.
The More You Can See, The More You Can Achieve
VMware vRealize Network Insight works hand in hand with VMware SD-WAN to deliver the context and insights you need to deliver a superior user experience. This end-to-end network visibility solution lets you visualize how traffic moves from one endpoint to another within a data center, and from branches to data centers to clouds. Using APIs, it lets you take advantage of telemetry and metadata from compute managers like VMware vCenter, as well as cloud environments like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. vRealize Network Insight also captures IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) and NetFlow information from different network devices to help you understand and correlate flow data with this metadata.
With enhancements to VMware SD-WAN’s visibility and capabilities around IPFIX and NetFlow, flow records from client endpoints originating from VMware SD-WAN Edges can be populated within vRealize Network Insight. VMware SD-WAN Orchestrator shares a wealth of information with vRealize Network Insight, including the overlay and underlay health of VMware SD-WAN branches, traffic metrics, packet metrics, and details about which applications are being accessed.
What happens when you bring together all this powerful data? You get total end-to-end visibility, from a branch user flowing through a VMware SD-WAN Edge to an application protected by VMware NSX Data Center.
Troubleshooting Across Multiple Domains
Gaining full visibility across all your environments not only helps you understand how your applications are communicating, but creates a powerful Day-2 ops tool for troubleshooting your business infrastructure. For example, consider an enterprise SDN network with branches worldwide. It might be supporting SD-WAN branches in India, the Netherlands, and cities across the U.S.
Suppose you have an end user at the Detroit branch who’s trying to watch a two-tier video training application. The training application interface resides in a data center in Washington, and the app is on AWS. But the application is buffering, so she’s not getting smooth performance. She reaches out to support, and a help desk staffer opens up vRealize Network Insight to troubleshoot:
An application view provides an overview of the entire application, including the video tier, the storage tier in AWS, and all the other elements.
Clicking on Flows and Degradation analysis shows all the flows between the Washington data center and the branch in Detroit.
The support professional can click on a specific flow to get an end to end topology view. The technician clicks on the VM underlay to check out the video server, and sees alerts on the VM, and the physical NIC. A switch on the underlay is having issues, and the technician can drill down further to see which physical port is saturated.
To resolve the issue, the technician vMotions the VM to a different host that’s on a different physical switch port.
With just a few minutes of troubleshooting, the issue is resolved, and the end user can get back to her video training application.
Visualize Better Business Outcomes at Our Webinar
Join us at our upcoming webinar on October 21, The Value of End-to-End Visibility for SD-WAN + Data Center + Cloud. We’ll show you how better visibility and analytics for VMware SD-WAN, combined with data from data centers and multiple clouds, along with vRealize Network Insight, can deliver better outcomes. Topics include:
Visibility of end-to-end latencies and overall SLAs for improved application performance
Troubleshooting performance issues and security issues
Capacity planning and forecasting across ISPs
Don’t miss this opportunity to gain better insight into your environment, so you can save time, make smarter decisions, and deliver the consistently great performance users expect.
