SD-WAN addresses application user experience and IT operations challenges in today’s multi cloud era. However there is a critical requirement of enhanced visibility, reporting, analytics, and trends to ensure consistent and improved user experience.

Overseer, a Reporting & Analytics tool, translates the SDWAN operational data into actionable information and provides IT Operations Team an intuitive visualization of customized operational parameter reports over longer period to manage SD-WAN optimally, resulting in improved uptimes and application experience over WAN for the end-users.

Requirement Statement

IT Operations Teams face challenges to optimally manage SD-WAN networks, which may result in SUB-OPTIMAL USER EXPERIENCE ON APPLICATIONS, HIGHER DOWNTIMES, OVER-SUBSCRIBED CAPACITIES, THUS RESULTING IN LOSS OF MILLIONS IN REVENUE.

Few common challenges of native SD-WAN which Overseer endeavours to address are as follows:

Performance Management

1. Customers require operational parameter trends over a longer period to analyse service quality.
2. Segmentation of WAN operational parameters based on regions/zones is required for better monitoring & management of SD-WAN.
3. Customers need certain customized reports depending on their business requirements and industry verticals.
4. Customers need predictive insights for capacity planning.

Fault Management

1. Customization of Event/Alarm severity.
2. Realtime Notifications/Alerts leveraging collaboration platforms
3. Integration between tools [SD-WAN, ITSM] for faster fault resolution. Intuitive GUI for network configuration providing agility & assurance instead of CLI configurations which are more prone to errors

Solution

Overseer is a Reporting & Analytics tool that helps in solving the day-to-day challenges of Cisco’s SD-WAN historical reporting, of Overlay performance, Carrier Performance, providing insights on underlay & overlay paths and customizing reports. This enables you to derive more value and benefits from your SD-WAN investments.

Overseer application interacts with SDWAN vManage through API’s at regular intervals to keep a check on key performance indicators (KPIs) of SDWAN operational data and present them in a coherent way. Operational information empowers decision-makers to get the best ROI by improving WAN operational efficiency, reduce operating cost, reduction of downtime and improved performance over time.

1. Reporting and Analytics Engine – Polls SD-WAN operational data at regular intervals
2. Provides Unified dashboard for performance management, ease of monitoring, analytics and reporting
3. Converts raw data into Insights providing Intuitive Visualization formats, for the operations team to manage SD-WAN optimally
4. Historical reports and trends (up to 90 days or more), easily downloadable in excel, csv or pdf
5. Manages events by recognizing and sending alerts to operations team through email, SMS, WebEx Teams, 3rd Party Tools
6. Integrates with ITSM tool for incident, change and problem management
7. SD-WAN fabric can be segmented into Administrative Zones for improved management
8. It can connect to multiple vManages to poll data and can collate information for an organization view.

Benefits

Performance Management Improvement

1. Services improvements: Overseer provides trends [up to 90 days] on below operational parameters that help in monitoring KPIs to improve WAN uptime, application performance, and manage ISP SLAs.
2. Overlay Paths [with respect to Latency, Jitter and Loss, and their respective SLAs]
3. Device Health [with respect to CPU & Memory utilization and their respective thresholds]
4. Bandwidth Utilization [in terms of percentage utilization]
5. Improved Administrative Management with role-based access: Overseer facilitates the Segmentation of SD-WAN infrastructure based on regions/zones/customized groups. The segmentation helps SD- WAN infrastructure into smaller manageable domains resulting in improved performance.
6. Consistent end-user experience for enterprise applications: Trend Analysis of Bandwidth utilization helps in forecasting capacity requirements both in terms of improved performance and cost optimization
7. Compliance to customer RFP requirements: Overseer creates differentiated value proposition due to its ability to generate customized reports thereby helping create more business opportunities.
8. User can define all settings in the administrator panel and configure the software.

Fault Management Automation

1. Reduced Downtime: Events/Alarms severity are configurable and can be customized to help prioritization of fault resolution
2. Faster Incident Reporting and Resolution: In addition to ITSM, Overseer also integrates with Collaboration platform (WebEx Teams) for sharing incident details with relevant stake holders.
3. Auto ticketing to improve resolution time: Overseer integrates with ITSM tool for auto ticketing reducing manual efforts and eliminates human errors thus positively impacting the resolution time by more than 30%.

System Requirements

The system requirements for deploying the application are

• ‍Server: CPU:64-bit processor, Cores: 16, 2.4 GHz , Memory 16 GB
• ‍Storage: 1 TB SAS  storage
• ‍Operating System: LINUX 7.x or later stable version with updated packages and repos
• ‍Database and version: MYSQL 5.7+ (Our application works in community edition)
• Note: If customer has compliance requirements then they will have  to buy MySQL license from Oracle.
• ‍Other software without license: Python, Tomcat, Java, Gunicorn , Ngnix
• ‍Other software with License: None
• ‍Connectivity for remote Deployment: Public IP/VPN requirement
• ‍Others: no firewall blockage for remote access and Admin access on VM.
• ‍PORTS: Application port 80, 5004 or above, Database port TCP 3306, HTTPs if applicable: 443

API’s Used

The following Rest APIs of vManage are used

1. Alarm, Audit Logs and Events APIs
2. Bulk APIs
3. Device Inventory APIs
4. Device Action Status APIs
5. Real Time Monitoring APIs

References

https://developer.cisco.com/docs/sdwan/#!introduction

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