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Prisma SD-WAN Administrator’s Guide

Prisma SD-WAN Performance Policy

Table of Contents

Prisma SD-WAN Performance Policy

Performance policy utilizes link quality metrics such as Latency, Loss, and Jitter and application performance metrics such as Application RTT and Init failure % as SLA metrics.

Where Can I Use This?	What Do I Need?
Prisma SD-WAN	Active Prisma SD-WAN Subscription. Physical and virtual ION devices running software version 6.3.1 and higher.

Measuring application performance and delivering App SLAs is a core component of Prisma SD-WAN. Performance Policy builds upon the existing App SLA configuration to deliver a policy framework for the measurement, enforcement, and alerting for application SLAs.

Performance Policy utilizes link quality metrics such as Latency, Loss, and Jitter as well as application performance metrics such as Application RTT and Init failure % as SLA metrics. If the SLA metrics are violated, the system takes action to ensure that the SLA is enforced including moving flows to a compliant path (if available) and invoking line conditioning such as Forward Error Correction (FEC)
to ensure the SLA is met. Optionally, an incident can be generated for critical applications when an SLA is violated. Although default policies work well for most environments, policies can be granularly tuned per application, path type, DC group, and circuit category to align to the performance needs of the business.

The system automatically assigns a default policy stack to a site as part of the default policy configuration. You can't remove the default set from the default stack, default rules from the set, or the default threshold profile from rules. Your ability to make changes is limited to editing the actions and thresholds for default policy rules. After you configure a rule, it takes precedence over the default rules based on the order of rules. The default values for Media Apps are set at latency = 150ms, packet loss = 2%, and jitter = 40ms. For all other Apps, default values are latency = 500ms, packet loss = 5%, and jitter = 100ms.

The following are the Performance Policy functions and supported device software versions:

Function	Software Version
Action : Move Flows, Visibility, Incident	6.3.1 and later
Action : Forward Error Correction (FEC)	6.3.1 and later / 6.3.2 recommended
Match Criteria : Application, Transfer Type, Circuit Category, Path Type, Service & DC Group	6.3.1 and later
SLA : Application Metrics, Link Quality Metrics	6.3.1 and later
Action : Packet Duplication	6.4.1 and later
SLA : Service Health Probes	6.4.1 and later
SLA : Incident action for System Metrics; CPU, Memory, Disk, Concurrent Flows, Circuit Utilization	6.4.1 and later
SLA : Application UDP-TRT for DNS, Link Quality MOS	6.4.1 and later

To prevent the need for policy migrations, configuration of a function that is not supported by a specific device version where the policy rule is bound is permitted. However, the device will ignore the configuration for the entire rule if any function is not supported

Performance Policy Default Behavior

Add Performance Policy Stack

Add Performance Policy Set

Add Performance Policy Rules

Add Performance Policy SLA

Configure Probes

Best Practices and Recommendations

Performance Policy Use Cases