SD-WAN Topology Viewer (Folgearbeit)

Software defined WAN (SD-WAN) is a fast emerging and trending new technology to interconnect worldwide distributed company branches or customers. Many of the market leading network equipment providers, like Cisco, have developed their own SD-WAN solution. For IT professionals using SD-WAN solutions in global companies, the complexity of their network quickly becomes overwhelming. As a result, it is even harder to keep track of the network topology.

Cisco’s SD-WAN solution vManage is a web application shipped alongside their SD-WAN technology and is primarily designed for configuration purposes. Although it provides a simple graphical overview of the distribution of the individual routers on a world map, it lacks to apply a proper user centered approach. It is not designed for active monitoring of the infrastructure and does not display the IPSec tunnels. With the rise of SD-WAN, its products and non-existent monitoring solutions, the foundation for a solution to this problem has already been laid.

In contrast to Ciscos vManage web application, the SD-WAN Topology Viewer (SDWANTV) puts the emphasis on a clean visual representation of the topology and a historical view of the metrics. As the foundation of the bachelor thesis, we have taken the result of a previous semester thesis. We extended the existing software with much needed new functionalities and dramatically improved the software architecture. With a historical metric dashboard and a customer limited view, the SDWANTV extended the target audience to customer and network administrators alike.

Our system fetches all information from Ciscos vManage API with a scheduled task runner. The tasks then propagate the collected data to a timescale database and via active WebSocket connections directly to state-of-the-art single page application written in React. Due to the strict separation between frontend and backend, a user can enjoy real time state updates of the topology and observe the latest as well as historical tunnel metrics via a REST Application Programming Interface (API) in one single cloud ready application, shipped with a helm chart for easy installation.