Hello everyone!
I hope your Summer has started off very nicely. I don't have any children yet, but I have plenty of nieces and nephews and I know they are all excited to be done with the school year. They are looking forward to hanging out with friends, going on vacations, swimming, etc. Their parents aren't so thrilled to have them around ALL OF THE TIME, but they do like to see their kids happy.
However, before we get to the fun times, we still need to finish up the school year. That means finals and report cards. I know one of my nephews who may not be doing so well (I'm looking at you Landon!).
If you think about it, finals and report cards are ways for parents to know how their children are progressing in school and how much they are understanding what the teacher is teaching. It is a progress report on the children, but it is also a judgment on how the teacher is doing. If your child doesn't get good marks, you may consider hiring a tutor or holding them back a year. It's a great way to figure out what you need to do to ensure your child is happy and has a great future ahead of them.
Wouldn't it be cool to have this kind of progress report for other things in your life? Maybe to have something like this for your network…
Well guess what! With Juniper AI-Driven SD-WAN you can get this! That's what this week's Feature Friday is going to be about: SLEs!
SLEs
SLEs stands for Service Level Expectations or Service Level Experiences depending on who you talk to. Either way, what they represent are simplified metrics that tell you how your network is performing so that you can give your end users the best experience possible. That's why we take an Experience First Networking approach. With the Juniper Full Stack, you get these SLEs across your Access Points, Switches, SD-WAN Routers, and (introducing) your NAC. However, since this is the SD-WAN community, I am just going to focus on that.
For those who have experience with the Session Smart Router, you may be familiar with all the telemetry and statistics that each router gathers. I mean, just take a look at this page. So much information, and a lot of it good too. However, it's up to you to figure out what is useful to you.
With SLEs it is not that way anymore! We've used AI and ML (that's artificial intelligence and machine learning) to go through this data, find patterns, and break down your network performance into three main SLEs.
WAN Edge Health
This SLE gives you a report on how the health of your SSR or SRX is doing. It is broken into classifiers such as Power, Memory, Temperature, and CPU. If you see issues here, then you know your problem is at the device itself and not on the LAN or the WAN.
WAN Link Health
This SLE gives you a report on health of your WAN Links (so the ISP side). It is broken into classifiers such as Network (which is broken into Jitter, Loss, Latency, and Peer Path Down), Interface (which is broken into Cable Issues, Congestion, and LTE Signal), and ISP Reachability (which is broken into ARP and DHCP). Troubleshooting issues with this SLE will let you know if the problem is on the WAN or the connection to the WAN.
Application Health
This SLE tells you if the problem is the application being accessed versus the device or connections. It is broken into classifiers that measure Jitter, Loss, Latency, Application Bandwidth, Slow Application, and Application Disconnects. The cool thing with this one is that this is a result of the Inline Flow Performance Monitoring I mentioned in a previous FF. The "Out of Band Flow Performance Monitoring" is measuring the WAN Link Health and the "Inline Flow Performance Monitoring" is measuring the Application Health. Both of these measurements can be used for MTTI or mean time to innocence (the amount of time it takes to determine that you are not the reason for the problem, the ISP or application is).
So, do you want to see these SLEs applied to your network? Then no problem, you just need to add WAN Assurance to your SSR or SRX deployment.
Still like your Session Smart Conductor but also want the SLEs? Then you can add WAN Assurance just for the telemetry. Features and instructions here.
Last thought before I bid you adieu. The great thing with AI/ML is that we are going to continue to get more and more telemetry and notice patterns and behaviors and continue to improve our SLEs or Marvis Actions. Prepare for amazing network experiences! It is really cool stuff.
For more information, check out the WAN Assurance Data Sheet.
As usual, a couple questions for you:
- Are you using WAN Assurance?
- What things would you like to uncover on your network?
- If you are Conductor managed but not using WAN Assurance, why?
- Will your kids have a fun summer or be punished for bad grades?
This week we were in Vegas for AI in Action. We had a blast getting to meet you and felt the event was a great success. If you were not able to attend, no worries, we have it recorded. Check it out here.
Also, next week, my friend Ken Dellovo and I will be hosting a webinar where we will talk about "What's New with SD-WAN?" It's going to be super informal and fun. I recommended stopping by if you are around. Find out more info here.
Alright, I hope you enjoy your summer and I will see you soon!
#FeatureFridays #WANAssurance #Conductor #SessionSmartRouter
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Justin Melloni
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