PAN-OS® software supports bandwidth as a path quality metric for SD-WAN traffic distribution. You can now define bandwidth thresholds and sensitivity levels within SD-WAN Path Quality profiles to ensure links have sufficient capacity before the firewall selects them for application traffic. The firewall evaluates path quality based on jitter, latency, packet loss, and now, bandwidth.

The system calculates real-time bandwidth usage across all dataplanes to monitor link capacity. During session setup, the firewall compares the current link usage against your configured thresholds. If a link’s usage exceeds the specified threshold, the system disqualifies that path to prevent congestion. By adding bandwidth to the path selection logic, you gain granular control over traffic steering.

This ensures that applications use links with available capacity, maintaining performance alongside existing jitter, latency, and packet loss parameters.

To ensure uninterrupted connectivity between the SD-WAN devices and Panorama, the SD-WAN plugin introduces an option to configure the dedicated tunnel to Panorama. Unlike the SD-WAN overlay network connectivity to Panorama that may go down, which causes unreachability of SD-WAN devices to Panorama, the dedicated tunnel stays connected all the time.

The dedicated tunnel to Panorama establishes a persistent and dedicated IPSec tunnels from your branch devices to Panorama through designated termination devices using direct internet access (DIA) interfaces. With dedicated tunnels in place, even if your primary SD-WAN overlay network becomes unavailable, your devices can still reach Panorama to receive configuration updates and troubleshooting commands.