Cisco vAnalytics: Simplifying Your Network Operations

“Change is the only constant in life” – this famous quote by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus is often used in a positive light. Try saying this to a network administrator, however, who constantly has to deal with changes in the network environment, and he will likely frown!

Cisco vAnalytics within an SD-WAN network

Over the past few years, SD-WAN has evolved to securely connect the hybrid workforce of an organization to applications deployed across multiple clouds and data centers. Typically, SD-WAN is built over a variety of transport paths, and it implements application-aware traffic routing to connect users to applications via the optimal transport path. However, there are many moving parts in these underlying transport paths that organizations do not control, and they are often in constant flux. Hence, organizations seek analytics solutions that offer greater visibility into their networks and provide insights that help these organizations take proactive measures to improve application delivery. Cisco vAnalytics is a cloud-hosted SaaS service that aggregates a large volume of telemetry data gathered from various vantage points within an SD-WAN network and produces insights that are otherwise hard to discern from raw monitoring data.   

Cisco launched a new version of its vAnalytics service, and here are its key benefits:

Enhanced Visibility

◉ Quickly assess your overall network and applications health – get a pulse on the quality of application experience and the uptime of your WAN circuits and sites.

◉ Get a perspective into the long-term historical behavior of your application and network performance metrics in order to establish benchmarks and detect deviations.

◉ Compare the performance of your applications and understand ongoing trends such as a drop in the quality of application experience (QoE) and a rise in application usage or latency.

Figure 1. Summary Dashboard showing an aggregated network and application health while drawing attention to problem areas

Faster Diagnosis with Actionable Insights

◉ Quickly detect applications experiencing problems and the magnitude of these problems to assess their overall impact.

◉ Get a multi-dimensional 360-degree view of an application experience alongside its associated network health—both at the aggregate and individual site level—to quickly isolate problem areas and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).

◉ Identify if your application or network issues are local to a site or a region, and accordingly narrow your target area to reduce mean time to identification (MTTI).

Figure 2. Application behavior over time with the correlated application-layer and network-layer performance indicators

Proactive Analytics

◉ Facilitate the exchange of telemetry data between Cisco SD-WAN and Microsoft 365 to optimize the delivery of Microsoft productivity applications using Cisco Cloud OnRamp for SaaS capabilities.

◉ Assess the quality of application experience across different application classes and adjust your application-aware routing policies to achieve optimal delivery.

◉ Schedule periodic reports for offline review and analysis in order to further optimize your network.

Figure 3. Application Dashboard with rich insights on application behavior, usage, trends, and distribution by application classes

You do not need to dive into deep waters to discover these nuggets – all the information listed above is available in just a few clicks through intuitive workflows built over a state-of-the-art graphical interface. Furthermore, this analysis can be exported as a password-protected pdf report.

Figure 4. A Sample Site Summary Report

Source: cisco.com