Setting up app rules.

In this short video, we’re going to take a look at creating new rules in the Orchestrator. It’s easy to create a new rule, to control the way the network prioritises specific apps or groups of apps. Click on New Rule, you’ll see the configuration screen. It’s the same screen we looked at in our previous tutorial, but this time, we’re creating a new rule from scratch rather than editing an existing one.

In the first box, you can give the rule a name, select applications or groups that the rule will apply to, and make other choices like priority and preferred links. If you’re creating a new rule for a specific application, you can either browse through the categories list on the left and choose the app name from the right, or you can use the search function to find the app you’re looking for straight away. Remember that when you choose a category in the left hand column, you can choose “all” in the right hand column to apply the rule to every app in that category. Down here you can choose how the network will prioritise the app or groups of apps included in this rule. Let’s take Facebook as an example. It’s not a crucial business app, so let’s make it low priority. And down here, we’ll choose “direct”, rather than Multi-Link. By choosing direct, we’re sending traffic straight to the internet, rather than taking it via our network core and then out to the internet anyway. By setting Facebook as a low priority, and avoiding sending its data through the core, we’re preventing it from taking bandwidth away from business-critical apps like video conferencing or Office 365.

Let’s explore that idea a little more. Apps like Facebook let you do lots of different things. You can browse and post, or stream media, or even use Facebook Messenger for chatting or video calling. The Orchestrator lets you treat each feature of Facebook with separate rules, if you need to. It’s simple. Just go to the search box, and type in “Facebook”. You’ll immediately see a variety of Facebook functions. Let’s say you want to create a rule to de-prioritise Facebook Embedded Video. You can choose it from the list, and then create the rule, just like you’d create a rule for any other app or groups. Let’s click OK to go back to the Business Policy tab. To save the new rule you’ve created, click on Save Changes, up here. The rules are listed in the order they take effect. Starting from the top, the first rule that applies to a data packet determines what happens to that packet. For example, if the packet belongs to a video conference and the first 3 rules don’t apply to video conferencing apps, but the fourth one does, then the packet will follow that fourth rule.

It’s easy to change the order of the rules, without complex rule editing. Just grab the three lines right next to the rule number, and drag the rule where you’d like it to be. Note that this feature is browser-dependant. Once you’ve made changes to the order of your rules, you’ll need to press “Save Changes”. As soon as you do, the new rule prioritisation will be pushed directly out to all the Edge devices included in the profile. Thanks for watching this short tutorial about business policies. On our website you’ll find plenty of other SD-WAN videos so make sure you take a look, catch you later.