Key Trends Shaping the Multi-Vendor SD-WAN Observability Landscape

The editors at Solutions Review have partnered with the experts at Broadcom to identify and summarize some of the key trends currently shaping the evolving landscape of multi-vendor SD-WAN observability.
The more complex enterprise networks become, the more essential Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solutions become. Using these solutions, enterprises looking to modernize can drastically improve how they manage and optimize their evolving network infrastructure.
For example, in the modern work environment, where distributed offices and cloud applications are fundamental to business operations, the centralized management and optimization capabilities made available by SD-WAN will give organizations the agility and control they need to support digital transformation initiatives while maintaining high performance and security standards.
“SD-WAN native management tools typically provide visibility into the overlay. However, they offer only limited or no insight into the underlay, especially circuits operated by third-party providers. This explains why you may struggle to infer whether a network device, an ISP, or a cloud provider should be held accountable as the source of a problem. Network teams need solutions to gain the end-to-end visibility required for operationalizing modern WANs, even beyond the edge.” Yann Guernion, Product Marketing Manager at Broadcom Inc.
Now that organizations are adopting SD-WAN solutions from more than one provider, they need to work with more sophisticated observability platforms capable of aggregating, analyzing, and correlating data from disparate sources. That’s one context where AI can provide a boon to network teams, as it streamlines their troubleshooting and triage processes across overlay and underlay monitoring data sets.
To help organizations improve their ability to evaluate, implement, and deploy their SD-WAN solutions optimally, Solutions Review has partnered with the experts at Broadcom to outline some of the emerging and future trends shaping the SD-WAN multi-vendor observability landscape.
Emerging Future Trends in the SD-WAN Multi-Vendor Observability Market
1) AI and Automation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most relevant trends in the marketplace, and its continued growth is already changing how organizations handle network monitoring and management. With the added support of AI, modern SD-WAN observability platforms can now leverage machine learning algorithms that can analyze network data in real-time, making it easier for companies to receive predictive insights and automated remediation recommendations. The AI-powered processes and automations these technologies enable can also detect patterns across various vendor environments, so IT teams can address problems before they impact business operations.
2) Network Performance Management
As SD-WAN deployments become more complex, sophisticated network performance management capabilities become more valuable than ever. To maintain its ecosystem, an organization needs detailed visibility into link capacity, bandwidth utilization, and user experience across its network infrastructure. That’s why modern observability solutions will continue providing granular insights into key performance indicators (KPIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) across various vendor implementations. With these features, network teams can monitor trends like latency, jitter, packet loss, and response times in real-time and use the resulting data to optimize network performance and quality of service.
3) Multi-Cloud Visibility
With more business traffic going from the office to data centers and the cloud, comprehensive visibility requires insight into cloud environments. The issue is that outside of network firewalls, enterprises often have little insight into where traffic is going, the performance from the end-user perspective, or who to call when issues arise—this lack of visibility results in wasted time and resources.
Extended, inside-out visibility into the cloud and ISPs is needed to visualize the complete end-to-end network delivery path and isolate third-party performance issues anywhere.
4) Security Integrations
Many organizations integrate cloud access security brokers (CASBs) or secure web gateways (SWGs) into secure access service edge (SASE) architectures to gain control over how users interact with cloud applications. Such technologies help enforce security policies, offering a centralized platform for managing cloud access and data security. However, while these solutions excel at detecting security threats and anomalous behavior, they are not equipped to monitor the health and performance of the network or the user experiences delivered by an application.
These security integrations can introduce significant performance overhead that impacts user experience. For example, the SSL/TLS inspection process—paramount to any attempts at securing encrypted traffic—demands decryption and re-encryption at multiple points, which adds latency to every connection. These delays can degrade service quality for latency-sensitive applications. The centralized nature of many security services can also create bottlenecks during peak usage periods, particularly when multiple branch offices route their traffic through the same security checkpoints.
The layered nature of modern security architectures further complicates performance issues. Each security service—from threat detection to data loss prevention (DLP) scanning—adds processing time. When these services are chained together, the cumulative effect can result in noticeable delays, timeout issues, and degraded application responsiveness. This is particularly pronounced for cloud applications that rely on frequent API calls or maintain persistent connections.
“To combat the snowballing risks of shadow IT in 2025, organizations should maintain and continually update a comprehensive inventory of all their systems, software, users, accounts, data, and third parties that have any access to corporate data. Solutions like Cyber Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) may greatly help with these tasks. Moreover, corporate users should all follow ongoing training to grasp the risks of shadow IT: even experienced software developers may carelessly deploy a container with production data in a cloud to experiment with some new features, eventually forgetting about it, let alone non-technical users with their home computers used for business or mobile devices.” Ilia Kolochenko, PhD., CEO at ImmuniWeb. Check out the Insight Jam Podcast to hear more from Dr. Kolochenko.
These challenges extend to capacity planning and scaling, too. Security services must process increasing traffic volumes as organizations adopt more cloud services. During sudden traffic spikes, security devices may become overwhelmed, leading to increased latency or, in some cases, failed connections. These situations can trap organizations in a corner, forcing them to choose between maintaining their security policies or ensuring acceptable application performance.
5) Topology Intelligence
Network infrastructures now span across on-premises, software-defined, and multi-cloud environments, which has created significant challenges for network architects and administrators who need to maintain consistent and clear visibility into those environments. That’s where topology intelligence has become especially valuable and has evolved from a luxury to a necessity. It provides crucial capabilities enabling SD-WAN teams to visualize and understand networks comprising thousands of tunnels and devices.
These tools automatically map and display network relationships in real-time through new visualization techniques, providing multi-layered visibility across the entire SD-WAN fabric, from physical connectivity to overlay networks and application paths. Teams can quickly identify bottlenecks, troubleshoot issues, and understand traffic flows through their increasingly complex infrastructure.
The solution automatically discovers and updates network topology as changes occur, reshaping how we understand and manage modern enterprise networks. By correlating performance data with topology visualization, teams can identify the cause of issues, track the impact that network changes might have, and, more broadly, help teams improve their SD-WAN management across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
The Bottom Line: Importance of SD-WAN Continues to Grow
Digital transformation initiatives continue to expand, and the SD-WAN space is poised to grow alongside it. The need for comprehensive observability across multi-vendor is accelerating, and its ongoing importance will drive innovation in monitoring and management best practices.
The future of SD-WAN observability will likely see further advancement in AI capabilities, too, and include deeper integration with security tools and more sophisticated analytics features. To succeed in an increasingly complex environment, IT leaders must stay informed of these trends, explore emerging technologies, and continually evaluate their overall observability strategy.