Hi Everyone!
This is my first (non #Trivia) related posted of Fall. Things have been crazy busy over here, but I hope you all have been doing well.
One of the things I have been busy with is moving. As you might remember from my previous posts, I moved over the summer. Moving is sooooo stressful. According to a website I visited once (remember everyone, always double check your sources), moving is one of the top 5 most stressful life events. I want to keep things cheery, so I won't discuss the other 4, but yea, it's been stressful for me.
The act of moving in and of itself is stressful (finding a place, finding movers, making sure you didn't leave anything in your old place, adjusting to your new space, getting the utilities set up, etc.). The other part of moving that is really hard is the fact that time doesn't just stop for you. I still needed to get my work done, take care of my family, take care of the animals (literally just shaved the dog again, btw), socialize, take care of myself, etc.
I felt over-utilized and burned out. If I was one of my characters from The Sims, all of my bars would be red. The good news is I feel better now. And I got to this point by:
- Noticing everything that I am doing that is making me feel burned out
- Prioritizing
Now, think about your WAN interfaces (yep, weird transition coming in for the landing). There is probably sooooo much traffic going across those interfaces. You may have people complaining about slow speeds, poor performance, jitter, lag, etc. It could be that you need to purchase more bandwidth from your Service Provider, or it could be that you need to reprioritize your traffic. We discussed how to reprioritize your traffic in a previous Feature Friday on Traffic Engineering. However, how do you know which traffic is going across your WAN interfaces in order to know which to prioritize?
Well, I have the answer for you, and it is our Feature Friday: WAN Link Utilization Insights!
WAN Link Utilization Insights is a new chart available to you within the Mist Cloud. It looks like this:
You'll find it when you go the WAN Edge Insights and scroll down to WAN Edge Ports.
This chart shows us our bandwidth used and what applications/type of traffic is using that bandwidth. This is a great tool to help you with your finger pointing (i.e. prove it's the application team that is slowing down the network) and to help you figure out what traffic to give higher priority and what traffic to give lower priority when you do Traffic Engineering.
On top of that, I just love looking at charts and getting data on what's going on in my network. I do it for my home network too (don't tell my gf 🤫).
Anyway, this was a short Feature Friday because that is the great thing with charts, they are pictures and like pictures they tell a thousand words. For you, I hope some of those words are "best user experience."
Alright, I want to hear from you now:
- Are you using the Mist Cloud/WAN Assurance yet?
- Have you explored the WAN Edge Insights page and noticed the WAN Link Utilization Insights chart?
- Any interesting insights come from your viewing of that chart?
- How is your Fall going?
- Got any moving tips?
I hope you have a great Fall and I look forward to speaking with you soon!
#FeatureFridays #SessionSmartRouter #TrafficEngineering #SD-WAN #LinkUtilization
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Justin Melloni
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