Internet Breakout Trends

Monitoring > Performance > Internet Breakout

This tab displays trends for internet breakout traffic for each overlay. You can view trends for certain data about the internet breakout links including latency, loss, jitter, MOS (mean opinion score), and auto by selecting these options from the tab header. Each metric is displayed in a separate chart for each overlay. Orchestrator determines a value for a metric, such as latency, by measuring the traffic in all the tunnels within each link and averaging the results across the link for that metric.

Internet breakout is traffic that is sent from a local branch directly to the internet, rather than going through an IP Sec tunnel or out to a data center and through a firewall to the internet. Internet breakout traffic routing is determined during business intent overlay (BIO) configuration. To configure internet breakout traffic for an overlay, select the overlay and navigate to Breakout Traffic to Internet & Cloud Services > Link Selection.

Internet Breakout Modes

There are two modes for managing internet breakout traffic, Waterfall and Balanced. For each BIO you choose which mode to use for internet breakout. Performance metrics for internet breakout traffic are captured and charted on the Internet Breakout tab when either mode is in place.

Waterfall

In waterfall mode, the system infers which internet breakout link is performing the best at that moment and it fills the link up with traffic until it reaches 80% then it routes the traffic to the next best link. Orchestrator uses the data gathered about the links through inference, the Rank Links By setting, and an algorithm to determine what is the best path to the internet through each of your labels. During link selection it also applies any performance thresholds you have set. If the primary link exceeds any of the thresholds, the system waterfalls the traffic to the next link.

The following figure shows an example of how Waterfall mode is applied and how it infers the best path to the internet.

In this example the following applies based on the Link Selection settings:

• INETA average inferred latency = 52ms

• INETB average inferred latency = 73ms

• INETA has the lowest inferred latency, so use INETA for internet breakout

• Route traffic to INETB when INETA reaches 80% or when INETA exceeds any performance thresholds

• Exclude any links that have an inferred loss greater than 10% or an inferred latency greater than 500ms

• If all links exceed the performance thresholds, use the next item in the Preferred Policy Order list. If there is no Preferred Policy entry beneath Local Breakout the traffic will be dropped.

  • In this example, if all labels exceed the performance threshold of 100ms of latency, the traffic will backhaul because “Backhaul Via Overlay” is listed beneath Local Breakout in the Preferred Policy Order.

  

Balanced

In balanced mode, Orchestrator uses weighted round robin and it distributes the traffic across the links evenly proportional to the amount of bandwidth on each interface. It determines the ratio based on the amount of bandwidth on each interface. You can set performance thresholds for loss, latency, and jitter, and if a link exceeds any threshold it is excluded from the available links.

Additional Operational Notes

• Link Selection provides a session-affinity feature that pins all flows between an internal IP and an internet IP to the same Local Breakout label. Once an initial label is selected by the Link Selection mechanism, all flows between source and destination IPs stick to the same label until all flows between the two hosts are inactive for 2 minutes. Performance Thresholds override session-affinity.

• To see why a label was selected for a flow, refer to the Internet tab of the Flow Details. The “Best internet link choice reason” item shows why the Link Selection feature pinned a flow to a given label. In this example, “MOS” was configured in the Rank Links By section of the Link Selection settings.

  

  The following table describes the possible Best internet link choice reasons.

  Reason	Description
  MOS	Ranking of the links is done using the MOS (mean opinion score) quality attribute.
  low-loss	Ranking of the links is done using loss.
  Low-latency	Ranking of the links is done using the latency attribute.
  Manual	No attribute is used to do the ranking, it follows the order configured by the user.
  Session-affinity	The flow took the path of an earlier flow with the same src+Dst IP because that flow was started within the last 60s.
  brownout-limit-crossed	One or more more links crossed the brownout threshold.
  In-house-metric	Ranking of the links is done using an in-house (auto) metric
  tunnel-down	The passthrough tunnel was momentarily down, so it was skipped.
  No-primary-link	No primary links were found after ranking because either none were configured or all of the links crossed performance thresholds.
  primary-bwfull	The bandwidth for all primary links crossed the performance threshold.
  no-backup-link	No backup links were found after ranking because either none were configured or all of the links crossed performance thresholds.
  bkup-bwfull	The bandwidth for all backup links crossed the performance threshold.
  fallback-to-next-policy	All primary and backup links are browned out or blacked out, so it moves to the next preferred-policy.
  all-links-blackout	All primary and backup links are blacked out.

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