Information About Default AAR and QoS Policies
It is often helpful to create an AAR policy, a data policy, and a QoS policy for devices in a network. These policies route and prioritize traffic for best performance. When creating these policies, it is helpful to distinguish among the applications producing network traffic, based on the likely business relevance of the applications, and to give higher priority to business-relevant applications.
Cisco SD-WAN Manager provides an efficient workflow to help you create a default set of AAR, data, and QoS policies to apply to devices in the network. The workflow presents a set of more than 1000 applications that can be identified by network-based application recognition (NBAR), an application recognition technology built into Cisco IOS XE Catalyst SD-WAN devices. The workflow groups the applications into one of three business-relevance categories:
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Business-relevant: Likely to be important for business operations, for example, Webex software.
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Business-irrelevant: Unlikely to be important for business operations, for example, gaming software.
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Default: No determination of relevance to business operations.
Within each of the business-relevance categories, the workflow groups the applications into application lists, such as broadcast video, multimedia conferencing, VoIP telephony, and so on.
Using the workflow, you can accept the predefined categorization of each application's business relevance or you can customize the categorization of specific applications by moving them from one of the business-relevance categories to another. For example, if, by default, the workflow predefines a specific application as business-irrelevant, but that application is important for your business operations, then you can recategorize the application as Business-relevant.
The workflow provides a step-by-step procedure for configuring the business relevance, path preference, and service level agreement (SLA) category.
After you complete the workflow, Cisco SD-WAN Manager produces a default set of the following:
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AAR policy
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QoS policy
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Data policy
After you attach these policies to a centralized policy, you can apply these default policies to Cisco IOS XE Catalyst SD-WAN devices in the network.
Background Information About NBAR
NBAR is an application recognition technology included in Cisco IOS XE Catalyst SD-WAN devices. NBAR uses a set of application definitions called protocols to identify and categorize traffic. One of the categories that it assigns to traffic is the business-relevance attribute. The values of this attribute are Business-relevant, Business-irrelevant, and Default. In developing protocols to identify applications, Cisco estimates whether an application is likely to be important for typical business operations, and assigns a business-relevance value to the application. The default AAR and QoS policy feature uses the business-relevance categorization provided by NBAR.
Benefits of Default AAR and QoS Policies
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Manage and customize bandwidth allocations.
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Prioritize applications based on their relevance to your business.