Miercom Test endorses Cisco SD-WAN’s Application Visibility and Control Capabilities – Cisco Blogs

The new paradigm that enterprises deal with includes connecting users to countless applications including business critical applications which may be hosted on-premises or in the cloud. With millions of users worldwide connecting – from many sources, enterprises and service providers have not been able to accurately and completely monitor, report on, and manage service and performance levels of all of these interactions. To reduce network congestion and increase operational efficiency -, customers must be able to accurately identify and control application traffic in the WAN,  the Internet and the enterprise edge demarcation boundaries. Customers must also be able to monitor and improve application responsiveness and adhere to SLAs in enterprise and service provider networks.

Cisco Application Visibility and Control provides a powerful pervasive, integrated service management solution based on stateful deep packet inspection (DPI). With the Cisco AVC, instead of processing packets as individual events the SD-WAN solution fully reconstructs flows and the Layer 7 state of each application flow for application- and session-based classification and management of IP traffic.

With Cisco SD-WAN Application Visibility and Control, customers can:

• Discover network traffic with application-level insight through deep packet inspection into web traffic.
• Monitor, classify , analyse and report on application usage and consumption.
• Implement fair-use policies and manage network congestion by optimising application-level traffic.
• Cisco’s partnership with Microsoft offers Integration with Microsoft365 for enhanced telemetry which is a key Cisco SD-WAN differentiator.
• vManage user interface shows categories of applications based on various types

• vManage dashboard also shows bandwidth usage for different application

• Recognizes 1400+ application signatures

Conversely, our competitor only offers 533 applications including the cloud applications in its controller dashboard.

Their application dashboard fails to provide features like enhanced office365 telemetry due to lack of integration with Microsoft and has far less intuitive application performance metrics compared to Cisco. They lack automation in displaying the bandwidth utilization charts and customers are required to choose the respective applications manually to view such details.

By comparing the functionality and performance for both the solutions, we can conclude that Cisco offers almost 1000 more application signatures than our competitor, as well as a more intuitive dashboard and granular application visibility.

For more details on the test performed and other features compared, please refer to the detailed Miercom Report.

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