By Sandeep Balijepalli, Principal Product Manager, VeloCloud Division of Broadcom
VeloCloud SASE and SD-WAN have revolutionized enterprise connectivity by combining intelligent path selection, application-aware routing, zero touch provisioning and comprehensive visibility — all delivered through secure, centralized management. As enterprise networks become increasingly distributed across offices, cloud environments, and remote locations, the need for proactive monitoring capabilities becomes critical. In today’s data-driven landscape, successful enterprise WANs translate network telemetry and and application behavior patterns into actionable insights, enabling network leaders to drive strategic business decisions.
This blog explores how Link Insights, an upcoming proactive link monitoring feature, can turn link performance data into powerful insights, reduce troubleshooting time, enhance user experience and deliver measurable business value.
Finding clarity in complexity
Link performance is influenced by multiple metrics, including loss, latency, jitter, throughput, time of day, geographic region, and traffic load. The real challenge isn’t just data availability, but it's much more complex. While data provides valuable insights, monitoring at scale and correlating these metrics with application performance to identify patterns of sustained degradations presents significant challenges. True value emerges when the solution is able to translate the raw data into actionable insights. For example, take a Monday to Friday business with high payment traffic during work hours. Understanding this context and providing insights will allow a network admin to prioritize and quickly resolve any weekday disruptions over weekend disruptions. This ability drives meaningful troubleshooting and appropriate resolutions.
Resolve network issues with analytics-driven Link Insights
To help customers manage complex network data and derive meaningful insights, VeloCloud is working on Link Insights, an advanced analytics solution that transforms complex network data into actionable intelligence. This powerful new analytics feature combines network performance monitoring with sophisticated behavior analytics. By analyzing traditional metrics and behavioral trends across your enterprise network, the solution will proactively identify usage patterns, detect and diagnose link anomalies, and predict potential issues, thus improving operational efficiency.
Some of the key salient points of link analytics are as follows
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Delivers link-level insights with incidents displayed on intuitive maps and graphs
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Identifies affected applications, edges, and ISPs with performance metrics such as traffic loss, latency, and jitter
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Shows incident times on LinkQoE chart with traffic, VeloCloud SD-WAN Edge model, Geo, ISP, and transport metadata
A sneak peek into our link analytics design
Link Insights will debut in the upcoming release as part of the new Insights tab in the VeloCloud Orchestrator - a centralized view of key trends across network, security, and remote metrics.
Figure 1: Example of a Link Insights screen that will be available in the VeloCloud Orchestrator
The key highlights of Link Insights will include:
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A summary view of all link incidents and deviations that need to be investigated
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Geo locations and location-based analysis of link incidents provides valuable insights to customers on where these degradations have occurred
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Time of link incidents will help customers assess the time period of disruptions across their operations
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Involved applications is a crucial metric because any link disruptions can directly affect enterprise applications
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Additional metadata such as traffic distribution, the next hops and the impact of key KPIs will add value
Figure 2: Example of a Link Insights drill down page
Furthermore, customers will be able to drill down into the degraded links on a per-Edge basis. This will help them identify periods in time within the Quality of Experience (QoE) tab on where link incidents have been most severe and determine the kinds of traffic distribution (voice, video or transactional). Supplementing this, additional data such as platform models, traffic information, link performance statistics, and other crucial metrics will help enhance link troubleshooting incidents.
Transforming incidents Into actionable recommendations
As the Link Insights solution continues to learn from each incident, the recommendation engine kicks in to suggest next steps, ranging from simple business and security policy changes to complex actions such as link and Edge upgrades. These recommendations are powered by AI/ML techniques to deliver actionable insights to optimize network performance. Over time, these AI-driven recommendations will become context-aware to align with your organization's specific objectives and insights, thus ultimately transforming reactive troubleshooting into proactive optimization.
In addition to this, we are working to integrate with our newly released VeloBrain AI operator with a chat interface powered by generative AI, to provide deep network insights and interactive troubleshooting guidance along with recommended actions.
Excited to explore the Link Analytics feature? Get exclusive early access
We will be running a tech preview program to highlight this use case for this feature for a future release. Your feedback will drive innovation and help us build the most intelligent and efficient VeloCloud SD-WAN solutions.
For more information, contact us at velo-beta.pdl@broadcom.com or reach out to your partner or sales team.