Jul/Aug 19 - ChannelVision Magazine

virtual reality 41 July - August, 2019 | Channel Vision the network. Most MSPs usually can offer some level of visibility and might provide access to telemetry from edge devices and controllers (for example, telemetry from API, SNMP or IPFIX) for customers to use in their tools. Regardless of the approach, every organization will need some level of visibility to narrow down application issues and identify if it’s the service provider, network or wherever else a problem might be. Proactively debugging SD-WAN can be a challenge even for MSPs providing customers with the proper level of gran- ular visibility to debug if it’s really their issue or that of the MSP managed SD- WAN. Without the properly visibility, issues tend to get blamed on the least visible part of the network path. Many organizations will ask their providers about how they plan to troubleshoot, what information they’ll share with them and how they handle reporting. For example, with SD-WAN users can specify a preferred transport for spe- cific applications based on performance thresholds. A customer might be running VoIP but experiencing sub-par perfor- mance, or perhaps they’re experiencing occasional outages and want to know why this is happening. Basic SD-WAN reporting usually can illustrate the quality of the transport (is it good or bad?) but at times makes it difficult to map the exact application flow down to the reason. The reason could be that multiple transports are seeing packet drops so there’s no way for the SD-WAN to optimize paths. In order to get that level of visibility, it’s critical to utilize an NPMD solution that can actually look at that granular level, which may include packet-level analysis. Whether the SD-WAN is managed in- house or by a service provider, transport costs are expensive, so organizations need some way to validate the level of performance they’re receiving. Most Profitable SD-WAN Partner Model Q: Which approach is more profitable for you? Source: Heavy Reading End Users Biggest Complaints about SD-WAN Solution Provider Source: Cato Networks, March 2018 Don’t know/not sure SD-WAN vendor DIY Carrier provided managed SD-WAN They are about equality prifitable 25% Too complex 20% Poor service and support 19% Unpredictable application 16% Cloud datacenters are diffcult to deploy 13% Slow application performance 7% Lacks security (Select no more than three responses)