SD-WAN is coming...

Much like winter, SD-WAN is coming...and quicker than I had hoped (sales-driven decision, obviously). Whether or not we have the know-how, we're going to need to monitor and maintain this new technology and hardware. Has anybody started to (successfully) use SD-WAN in their network? How are you using and/or monitoring the equipment? Does Solarwinds have anything in the product roadmap to help monitor, maintain, or configure any SD-WAN technologies? Just curious how others are dealing with the inevitable.

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adatole

The latest release of NPM, just over a week old, has support for Cisco ACI devices. You can read all about it (plus a nice primer on SDN in general) here:

NPM 12.4 Is Now Generally Available!

zennifer

I have a Brocade VDX 6750 running in my environment - - makes it so very easy to manage my virtual environment. I am monitoring with SNMP - I do need to upgrade Solarwinds .. I am using older version and have had not issues monitoring.

RaviK

SD-WAN seems to be the only way forward with most enterprises jumping onto the SD-WAN bandwagon. Citrix Netscalar is also an option many enterprises have considered. Citrix SD-WAN 2100 series appliances, SD-WAN 410 series appliances do not show up as monitored devices under Solarwinds NPM even though they show up as Citrix nodes

sja

"SD WAN" is not IEEE /ietf standard its "bundle software" that change from vendor to vendor...

That is just a new "vendor lock-in" strategy.

if you go that way make sure the vendor deliver ALL the tools to manage the network

ioan_bucsa

What about us other folks not using ACI?:) Not many options outside Cisco. For example we tried monitoring Viptella gear (which is basically Cisco) and outside basic SNMP hardware details it is pretty difficult (or quite impossible) to poll more advanced stats.

tdowns

@sja That's pretty on-point from what I can tell. Here's a thread where my comments on our attempt to monitor our Cloudgenix SD-WAN with SolarWinds is at the bottom:

CloudGENIX SD-WAN Solution Orion Monitoring and Alerting

Other than maybe some useful snmp traps, I'm not thinking that (at this time) we'll be seeing much benefit from trying to set this up in SW. Here's sort of an example of one challenge: we're getting rid of dedicated MPLS connections and replacing with the Cloudgenix "secure fabric" - basically a mesh of Internet VPNs between multiple sites, each with multiple direct internet connections. Every site has at least two vpn connections and routes to each of the other sites. In their proprietary portal, Cloudgenix does a nice job of monitoring these links, including bandwidth, status and even flow data. I haven't found a way and don't really expect to be able to monitor this secure fabric with SolarWinds. In SW I can see the Interfaces of the SD-WAN device and their respective bandwidth usage, but nothing as to how much of that is VPN traffic and/or the status of the many tunnels. I'm still working with them and seeing what we can get with traps and their MIBs, but I'm not expecting much. This is likely one of those cases where we just use their portal...