WAN Traffic and Performance Monitoring and Analysis

Monitoring the traffic and performance of your WAN Domain can directly translate into concrete results. WAN usage might cost money, but it always costs time. Anytime you can reduce WAN usage, you are saving time and perhaps money as well. Recall that a secure network is one that provides smooth operation and allows only authorized traffic. Access to your WAN is one of the necessary pieces in a distributed environment. If the WAN is down or unreachable, your distributed applications cannot function. Network problems could cause service interruptions and could result in noncompliance. You need to be aware how all parts of your network are working to ensure you are compliant.

Traffic monitoring and analysis for a WAN are nearly identical to the process used with the LAN-to-WAN Domain. The WAN Domain differs from other domains in that you probably don’t own or control the hardware or the software in the WAN. Your organization likely pays a subscription fee to connect to another organization’s WAN. You pay the WAN service provider either by bandwidth usage or a flat fee for a specified bandwidth limit. Because you are likely to pay for WAN access, proactively managing WAN traffic can reduce your need for additional bandwidth and reduce your WAN costs.

You can implement WAN traffic-monitoring and analysis software and devices in two ways. You can install software or devices on the perimeter of the WAN where you connect to it or rely on your WAN service provider to supply traffic-flow data. You gain far more control monitoring the WAN yourself, but you only have limited capability to affect the WAN’s performance. One technique is to send a message to another node on the WAN and have that node echo a response. The first node can analyze the route and duration the message took for the round trip. Comparing sample traffic with baseline data will reveal if the current performance is normal.

Several vendors provide tools to help monitor WAN traffic and optimize your WAN’s throughput. Real-time WAN optimization software can analyze current WAN performance and then modify how new traffic is sent across the WAN. These WAN optimizers can exclude unnecessary traffic, use compression to maximize bandwidth, cache data, and prioritize traffic to make the best use of your WAN. The result can be a noticeable increase in network speed. In this case, you haven’t made the network any faster, but you have used the available bandwidth more efficiently and increased your data throughput.

You can choose from many products to help optimize your WAN usage. Most of these products use similar methods to assess WAN performance such as sending and tracing the path of an echo. Not only can these tools detect performance problems, but by tracing the path, they can identify the fault to a specific hop.