Introducing App Prioritisation.

Thanks for joining me for a more in depth look at the Macquarie Telecom’s Orchestrator. So far, we’ve taken a look at how the Orchestrator makes it easy to see what’s happening right across your network. All these features were found in the “monitor” tab.

Now we’re about to take a look at how the Orchestrator gives you control over the network. Everything you’ll need to configure and deploy services on your network can be found in the “Configure” tab, over here on the left. First up, we’ll create one or more profiles for you, based on your requirements.

You can click on “profiles” to have a look at them. Here you can see an overview of all your profiles.

Over here, you can see how many Edge devices are using each one. If you’ve chosen to have “read/write” access, you’ll be able to configure these profiles yourself, directly within the Orchestrator. You’ll also be able to create your own profiles and apply them to edges, if you have this level of access. So, to have a look at how one of your profiles is configured, you simply click on the profile name. Then click on the Business Policy tab. Here you can have a look at the rules that have been set up, based on app fingerprinting and groups.

Down the left hand side, you’ll see some specific application names, and also the names of groups  – these allow you to allocate a number of similar apps to a category, and apply rules to the entire category. Over on the right hand side, you can see the specific network settings and prioritisation for the app or groups. For example, this group has been assigned to Multi-Path, so traffic for all the apps in the group can be sent over any of the available links. And over here, you can see how the app has been prioritised compared to other app traffic on the network. In this case, it’s high priority. So let’s take a look at how to change the priority of an app. Let’s say we want to make this app low priority. It’s not business-critical, so we don’t want it to take away network bandwidth from more important applications. Let’s click on “Web”. This brings up the “Configure Rule” screen. Here we have the option to change the rule name. Here we can choose the source and destination – in this case, we’ll leave both of these set to “any”.

Here, we have the option to define the applications that are included in the rule. In the left hand column, you can see a number of categories. On the right, all the applications that fall within the category are listed. You can choose a specific app, or you can choose “all”. Now we’ve defined the app or group of apps we’d like to apply the rule to, we can make some choices about how the network will treat those apps.

First, we can choose a priority level – either high, normal, or low. In some situations, you might want to set a hard usage limit for an app or group, as a percentage of the total site bandwidth. If you want to do that, click on “Rate Limit”, right here. Then it’s easy to choose the maximum allocated bandwidth for outbound or inbound traffic.

Next, we can choose whether the app (or group of apps), connects directly to the internet, or runs through the Multi-Path core. The Link Steering option lets us choose specific links for the app or group – for example, you could choose to send the traffic only over ethernet, or 4G. We recommend you leave this setting on auto, and let the Edge direct traffic across the most suitable link at any given time. The NAT and Service Class settings are pre-configured correctly by Macquarie Telecom. We don’t recommend you make any changes to these settings at all. Once you’ve finished, click on OK. You’ll be taken back to the configuration profiles screen. It’s really important that you click the SAVE CHANGES, to make your edits permanent. As soon as you click SAVE, the changes will be pushed down to all the Edges that use this profile. You can see which Edges are using the profile over here.

Thanks for watching this video, on our website you’ll find plenty of other SD-WAN tutorial videos. See you again soon.