Are You Observing Your SD-WAN at the Right Level?
SD-WAN has changed how networks are designed, deployed, and operated. Control is centralised, policies are abstracted, and traffic decisions are continuously optimised across multiple paths.
SD-WAN platforms already expose rich, fabric-level telemetry through their orchestrators, providing visibility that aligns more closely with how SD-WAN is actually run.
The SD-WAN Edge Is Not a Standalone Device
In many SD-WAN environments, visibility is established by enabling monitoring access directly on edge devices via SNMP. While this approach provides basic device-level signals, enabling monitoring access on SD-WAN edges via SNMP introduces a different set of considerations compared to campus or data centre infrastructure.
SD-WAN edge devices are typically:
- Internet-facing or externally reachable
- Deployed outside the traditional trusted network boundary
- Managed centrally but physically distributed
When SNMP is enabled on these devices:
- Management services must be exposed or reachable across networks
- Credentials must exist on every edge appliance
- Access paths must be carefully restricted and continuously maintained
As a result, many security teams treat SNMP-enabled edge devices as high-risk assets. In some environments, SNMP in edge devices is heavily restricted and explicitly avoided on edge devices altogether
Orchestrator-Based SD-WAN Monitoring with SolarWinds
To align monitoring with how SD-WAN networks are designed to operate, SolarWinds provides API-based monitoring through SD-WAN orchestrators, removing the need to rely solely on direct management access to edge devices.
SolarWinds supports orchestrator-level monitoring across multiple SD-WAN platforms, including:
This allows customers to apply a consistent monitoring approach across single- or multi-vendor SD-WAN environments.
What Visibility Looks Like at the Orchestrator Level
By integrating directly with SD-WAN orchestrators, SolarWinds surfaces telemetry that reflects how SD-WAN actually behaves in production.
Metrics Supported across vendor
Across all supported SD-WAN vendors, SWOSH provides monitoring for a core set of SD-WAN performance and health metrics, typically via API polling of the orchestrator :
Device & System Health Metrics
- SD-WAN orchestrator availability and response status
- Edge device status and basic system info
- Edge device CPU and memory utilization
Interface & Path Metrics
- VPN tunnel / path status
- WAN interface status for edge devices
- WAN uplink utilization (bandwidth in/out)
- List of monitored uplinks toward SD-WAN peers
Tunnel & Performance Metrics
- Latency (delay across tunnels)
- Jitter (variation in delay)
- Packet loss (tunnel / path)
- Top tunnels by metric (latency/jitter/loss)
Inventory details
- Orchestrator inventory and list of managed edge devices
- Edge names, models, serial numbers
- SD-WAN topology map
Leveraging Orchestrator APIs for SD-WAN Insight with Solarwinds
For organisations looking to reduce edge exposure, simplify operations, and gain clearer insight into application behaviour, moving visibility closer to the orchestrator is a logical next step—especially when that capability is already available through SolarWinds’ API-based SD-WAN monitoring.
