What you see is what you can measure, and what you can measure is what you can meaningfully act upon. Let’s talk about the rich visibility into traffic and trends that Citrix SD-WAN offers to enable you to manage your branch environments effectively.

Citrix SD-WAN ensures reliable, secure, and high-quality connectivity for branch and remote locations, helping companies to deliver better experiences for an increasingly distributed workforce.

But visibility is key to monitoring the network effectively, and, together, Citrix and SolarWinds can deliver it.

Enterprises have applications spread across public clouds, private clouds, and on-prem data centers, which can be overwhelming to manage. Regardless of where your application infrastructure is, Citrix SD-WAN provides visibility into more than 4,000 apps through a built-in deep packet inspection engine.

Citrix SD-WAN and SolarWinds

Citrix SD-WAN’s integration with SolarWinds, a leading network monitoring and visibility solution, helps to provide admins deep visibility and robust monitoring capabilities to enable a multi-product management framework. Citrix SD-WAN supports IPFIX, Netflow v9, and Netflow v5 and has been tested extensively with SolarWinds to bring superior visibility to our customers using Citrix SD-WAN and SolarWinds.

While, at a high level, IPFIX is comparable to Netflow, there is a definite and strong push for IPFIX usage by end users, with support from networking and security vendors to adopt a much more pervasive and flexible protocol. IPFIX has wide-ranging use cases that can broadly be classified into three main categories:

  • Flow analysis
  • Threat detection
  • Performance monitoring

Flow analysis is where IPFIX adds the most value, and Citrix SD-WAN integration with SolarWinds helps showcase this. There are three major use cases in flow analysis:

  1. Top applications: The most common statistics are for top-talkers — applications that are responsible for heavy bandwidth consumption. Flow reporting can identify which applications are consuming the most network bandwidth.
  2. Top talkers/conversations: As with top applications, you can also find out which are the top talkers/conversations/users in your network and use the data to analyze if the consumption seems unusual.
  3. Providing interface-level reports and alerts: A frequently used function is bandwidth reporting, including how much traffic is exchanged by a network endpoint on a particular network interface. SolarWinds provides in-depth, interface-level reports highlighting the volume of ingress and egress traffic, which is extremely valuable in creating utilization reports on a per-WAN-link basis. This report is key, especially for Citrix SD-WAN, because packets are sent over different WAN links based on network conditions, which vary constantly. Additionally, alerting provides information on when traffic thresholds such as bandwidth consumption may be exceeded. For instance, using the top talkers report, you can configure interface utilization alerts to notify when the network usage monitor exceeds your pre-established thresholds in order to quickly target bandwidth hogs and take proactive measures.

The integration between SolarWinds and Citrix SD-WAN gives customers valuable insights into their network, and there’s more to come that will give granular reports for application visibility. If you want to find out more about the depth of IPFIX reporting available on SolarWinds, please visit https://www.solarwinds.com/netflow-traffic-analyzer for more details.