: WAN Clarity Data Center Reports
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WAN Clarity Data Center Reports

Table of Contents

WAN Clarity Data Center Reports

The
Data Center
reports provide an insight into utilization trends from a Data Center perspective. Similar to the branch reports, these reports identify top applications, source IP addresses, destination IP addresses, source-destination IP address pairs, and undefined domains along with top branches. You can generate this set of reports for hotspots observed in the data center.
It is important to note that a hotspot definition for a data center differs from that for a branch. While for branches, utilization over 70% of configured bandwidth is considered a hotspot, for a data center, you may consider 90th percentile utilization as a hotspot. It, therefore, becomes imperative that you accurately set the circuit bandwidth allocations at the data center. These reports provide an approximation of the utilization trends as the reports generated only consider overlay paths.
In summary, the WAN Clarity Report generates every week to help you understand how the circuits in the
Prisma SD-WAN
AppFabric can be utilized from an entire fabric, site, circuit, application, and user perspective. These reports provide actionable insights that you can use for capacity planning, path policy adjustments, QoS policy adjustments, and enforcement of proper use of network resources by the end-user community.
The following sections describe the data center reports in the WAN Clarity Reports in more detail.

Traffic Distribution

The Traffic Distribution report helps administrators understand traffic volume distribution to all the data centers in the AppFabric. These reports help understand traffic flow from branches, applications, and top applications from top branches to and from the data centers in the form of Sankey charts. These reports deliver an HTML report with Sankey charts for the top 10 contenders and a CSV file with the entire dataset.
Traffic Distribution: Top Applications Report
Provides details into the flow of application traffic to and from all the data centers in the AppFabric. It provides visibility into the top 10 ingress and egress applications by volume.
The HTML report also provides an insight into top applications by total volume across all the DCs in the form of a Combined Egress and Ingress traffic report.
In the examples above, there is only a single data center: DC1. The data flow label above the data center block indicates traffic flow, either to or from that data center.
In the case of multiple DCs, you may decipher the traffic volume going to each of the data centers from the flow stream's thickness. The supplemental CSV can help understand the accurate distribution of application traffic volume across the data centers.
See the sample report below:
Traffic Distribution: Top Branches Report
Provides details into the flow of branch traffic to all the data centers in the AppFabric. It provides visibility into the top 10 ingress and egress flows from branches by volume and a combined summary report.
Traffic Distribution: Top Applications from Top Branches
Provides details into the top 10 applications emerging from the top 10 branches to all the data centers in the AppFabric. The report provides visibility into top ingress and egress branches and the top applications' flow by volume emerging from these branches.

Circuit Utilization

The
Circuit Utilization
report provides the utilization summary for all DC circuits on both the ingress and egress directions. The circuit utilization report consists of raw data packaged in CSV files that have information on circuit utilization data and percentile utilization. The report package also contains an HTML report for each DC circuit.
The HTML report contains a series of topics that shed light on the bandwidth utilization, observed hotspots, branches, applications, source IPs, destination IPs, and unknown domains contributing to those hotspots. We classify a circuit to be hot when the utilization is at the 90th percentile. The report provides a summary of the circuit configuration and bandwidth utilization in the form of provisioned bandwidth, median utilization, and 90th percentile utilization.
The Circuit Utilization report summarizes the circuit configuration and bandwidth utilization in the form of provisioned bandwidth, median utilization, and 90th percentile utilization.
The table above is from a report for DC1 - Circuit, where the 90th percentile utilization is at 5.33595% of the provisioned bandwidth, indicating that the circuit is not contentious and possibly overprovisioned.
The Circuit Utilization report then plots the utilization trend for the past week in an interactive chart that can zoom in and study the trend in detail. It also marks the 90th percentile utilization and highlights hotspots in red.
In the sample report above, the utilization above 53.35951 Mbps, as mentioned in the table, is highlighted in red as possible hotspots.
The circuit utilization report then highlights the top branches, applications, source IPs (branch IPs for ingress reports), destination IPs (branch IPs for egress reports), IP pairs, and undefined domains contributing to the hotspot. The sample reports below highlight the top contributors to the hotspots for DC1 – Circuit 1.

Hotspot Reports

The
Hotspot
reports generated for every DC site circuit give us visibility into the circuit’s 90th percentile utilization. The reports provide a list of branches, applications, undefined domains, destination IPs, source IPs, and source and destination IP pairs observed during the hotspots.
Hotspot Report
Description
Hotspot: Top Branches
Highlights the traffic volume contributed by the top 10 branches during the hotspot observed on the DC circuit.
Use data from this report to redefine data center transit features under path policies for branches.
Top branch transmitting traffic on this circuit when utilization is above the 90th percentile is shown below:
Hotspot: Top Apps
Highlights the top 10 applications contributing to the hotspot observed on the DC circuit over the course of the week.
Use data from this report to redefine path policies for applications that may directly offload to the internet. This report can also help network administrators redefine application priority to apply the right QoS to frequently used applications.
Top applications receiving traffic on this circuit when the utilization is above the 90th percentile is shown below:
Hotspot: Top Undefined Domains
Highlights the top 10 undefined defined domains contributing to the hotspot observed on the DC circuit over the week.
Use data from this report to redefine existing custom applications or create new custom applications.
Top undefined domains discovered for apps http, ssl, enterprise-http, and enterprise-ssl, receiving traffic on this circuit when utilization is above the 90th percentile is shown below:
Hotspot: Top Source IPs
Highlights the top 10 source IPs contributing to the hotspot observed on the DC circuit over the week. For the Ingress direction, these IPs are the Branch IPs.
For the egress direction, these IPs may identify as source IPs, i.e., indicating the origin being the data center.
Use data from this report to identify top contributors to the hotspot on the DC circuit and establish proper network resource enforcement.
Hotspot: Top Destination IPs
Highlights the top 10 destination IPs contributing to the hotspot observed on the DC circuit over the week.
For the egress direction, these IPs are the Branch IPs, indicating the flow termination are branches in the App-Fabric.
Use data from this report to identify top contributors to the hotspot on the DC circuit and establish proper network resource enforcement.
Hotspot: Top IP Pairs
Highlights the top 10 source and destination IP pairs contributing to the hotspot observed on the DC circuit over the week.
The Circuit Utilization report is generated for both ingress and egress directions for each data center circuit. It can assess utilization trends, refine path and QoS policies, and identify users who are misusing network resources, enabling the network administrators to enforce proper use of network resources.

Top N Reports

The
Top N
reports are a set of reports that provide insight into the top branches, applications, source IPs, destination IPs, source and destination IP pairs, and undefined domains for the entire week. Generate these reports for each data center in a CSV file with information about all the specific category contributors.
Use the insights from this report to understand site-specific trends and turn them into actions such as changing path policies, changing application priorities, and reassessing the provisioned bandwidth for over-subscribed and under-utilized circuits.
Unlike the Hotspots report, which only looks at flows that traversed the network during periods of hotspots, the Top N report studies flow and application data for the entire week to determine which applications, users, and domains contribute the most to high bandwidth utilization.

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