An Overview of Monitoring Challenges That Arise With SD-WAN

Sammanfattning: Software-Defined Wide Area Networks is a technology that has received a lot of attention in recent years. The technology enables direct Internet access without having to direct traffic through a data center. It also enables the use of less expensive Internet connections to build the Wide-Area Network, expensive Multiprotocol LabelSwitchingconnectionsarenolongernecessary. This results in greater responsibility for enterprises when it comes to ensuring performance within the network, where the previous dedicated links with a guaranteed performance by Internet Service Provider have been replaced with unpredictable best-effort connections. The project targets the challenges Software-Defined Wide Area Networks introduces in terms of monitoring, by examining the required network transparency between Wide-Area Network edges. A selection of Network Management Systems was evaluated with the requirements specification as a basis. The results show that more diligent monitoring at the edges is needed. Visibility into the underlay network, providing transportation, has to be available. Where the enterprises need to be able to examine path-selection of traffic per application. To ensure that the root of problems can be located in case of performance issues. This was not obtained by the evaluated Network Management Systems. Moreover, it turned out that there was no common standard available for monitoring the technology at the time of the project. The lack of knowledge in the field aimed to decrease with the degree project and the result is of greatest interest to companies that have made the transition to Software-Defined Wide Area Networks or are about to do so.