Well, if we know one thing about Cisco, and for the most part,
pretty much everybody in the technology world,
we are leaning more and more heavily into analytics.
Because we have all kinds of data that we're collecting.
And if we can feed it into an analytics engine,
then what we can do is we can create some sort of list of recommendations
based on what we find using the data.
Or for that matter, maybe some amount of troubleshooting.
All part of the concept of network assurance.
Now, on top of this, Cisco has also acquired a technology solution,
kind of like what they did with Viptela and SD-WAN.
In this case, it's a product known as ThousandEyes.
In your organization, you might be running ThousandEyes,
or maybe you've evaluated it.
But this is a network monitoring solution.
Although I will say that simply calling it a monitoring solution
feels a little bit like it's downplaying what it does.
But it is, as the name implies, paying attention to everything
that's happening in the network.
And it's providing an immense amount of data to an engine
that can, again, help us with recommendations
as well as troubleshooting.
So a very powerful tool that can help us out.
So what we're going to find is that Cisco has created a solution
in the SD-WAN world which leverages ThousandEyes
to create this type of scenario where we're creating recommendations.
And this product, or this feature,
is known as Predictive Path Recommendation, or PPR.
The idea here is that we want to explore AAR policies
that are coming to us from this type of situation.
Namely, that ThousandEyes is going to provide us with a ton of data
and then that ton of data is going to help us to create AAR policies.
But here's the problem.
We don't actually, or we can't just take data
and immediately create recommendations and policies.
Instead, we need to feed that into an analytics engine.
So what is that analytics engine?
It's known as SD-WAN Analytics,
which, like all of our other products in the SD-WAN space,
came from a Viptela product that had a little V in front of it.
So this was previously known as V Analytics,
and it's been a product that has been available
since Viptela had their own solution.
So the idea here is now we're going to leverage ThousandEyes
and we're going to leverage SD-WAN Analytics
just keeping in mind that this does require an additional license.
So we need a license to run SD-WAN Analytics.
We need ThousandEyes licensing.
So this is a solution, this PPR concept,
is going to come together from two different sets of licenses
that don't come by default with SD-WAN.
So this is probably not something we're going to be able to
lab up very easily without spending a bunch of money,
and it's something that we're going to need to really do
some cost-benefit analysis to make sure it's worth the extra money
to deploy into our environment.
So what is the net result?
I mean, we're trying to get to AAR policies after all, right?
So here's the example because what we want to find
is that we actually do end up getting some of these policies.
So let's say that we have decided to invest in ThousandEyes
and we've invested in SD-WAN Analytics.
So what we're doing is we're firing up PPR.
What are we going to see?
Well, it's going to crunch all of this data
and it's going to determine that based on what we're seeing here,
we're going to create an AAR policy.
So for example, maybe it gives a recommendation
and that was my cat knocking the keyboard off my desk.
So Office 365 has a bunch of applications
that we might use in our environment.
So let's say that it finds that based on our current policy,
that's load balancing or whatever the situation,
that we've got some kind of 88% performance level.
And it says, hey, we have created an AAR policy
that will take this to 100%.
Maybe it's going to use this link and only use this other link
in the event that there are performance issues.
And so it's, again, creating an AAR policy,
keep in mind that this has all of the thresholds baked in
for when to fail over.
So this is removing a lot of the guesswork
that we as admins often have to make
in order to deploy a policy such as this,
where I have to go and decide,
hey, what should my thresholds be for Office 365?
And I could do some Google searching and talk to Microsoft.
But the coolest part about this
is that when we really look at what's happening
and which products we're using,
that these thresholds are based on our own organization,
based on our own network.
So it doesn't matter what maybe Microsoft would recommend
or what other people recommend online via a Google search.
Instead, it's going to look at my network,
look at my WAN links, and give me an AAR policy.
And what's really cool about this
is that I can just do a click to deploy,
where it's going to allow me to say,
hey, do you want to deploy this policy?
Click this button, and then we go through the process
of pushing it out to our SD-WAN controller.
So very cool set of products here
that all come together, again,
with this predictive path recommendation.
Just keep in mind the limitations here
from a licensing perspective,
the products that we have to have in place.
But if our organization already runs Thousand Eyes,
then saying that maybe we should look into this
is probably a much more doable step.
But in the end, let's make sure we understand
what this product is, how it comes together,
and what it ends up giving us
in terms of recommendations for AAR policies.