It has the ability to prioritize, providing an automatic optimization. I can put it in a hierarchy and know that certain devices will be prioritized over others. It is able to identify the traffic. It can pick out whether if its a Zoom meeting (or something like that), then it's able to put that somewhere in the hierarchy based on the traffic type.

Exinda allows us to see what is happening with our network and apps. I use it for that somewhat. For example, if someone calls in, and say, "Hey, I'm having a problem with this. It's not performing very well." We can identify where the traffic is going and what kind of a policy it is falling into, which has been really helpful. It has enabled us to put directed and auto-pilot management mechanisms in place, based on best practices. Unless we have to touch it, it is set and forget for us.

Having the daily report able to look at and reference is a good feature. I know in the past that has given us some use cases. For example, we have so much traffic coming through that you can see the breakdown all day, e.g., how much is actually being used by academic applications. This sort of gives justification to what you are doing when you see a whole bunch of entertainment type stuff coming through. People might say, "Hey, I was in class today and performance was not as good as it should be." I will be like, "Well, let's look at what's happening." Then, you look and the majority of the network has been taken over by PlayStation and Xbox. If I put in another policy, then it should take care of performance issue. 

It's an invaluable tool. You need to have some kind of insight into what your users are doing on the network. If we had unlimited bandwidth to let people do whatever they wanted to, that would be great. However, the reality of it is, you don't have that and you need to prioritize.

You can allocate either a certain amount of bandwidth or just allocate a priority. I can take away bandwidth from rogue applications, if I'm like, "Hey, that's not really necessary that they have all this bandwidth for some crazy application out there where you have one or two users." I can go ahead and give that a lower priority and lower amount of bandwidth, decreasing the cap. That way, the applications that I want to take precedence can take the bandwidth that they need.

I do like is the recommendations on the dashboard when you log in, where it tells you, "This application is approaching the top 10 for the first time in seven days," or whatever. Then, it's like, "Let's see if I need a policy for that." For example:

• Is it something that's going to be ongoing? 
• Do I need to do something for it? 
• Or, is it just kind of a fluke thing that will get a lot of traffic, then it's going to die off?
• Why is it getting the top traffic? Is it an update that's going out?

It's kind of cool that you can see that.

I'm VAR engineer and support pre and post sales. The features that are most valuable to customers, in my view, are the variety of traffic management tools, the variety of built in data, graphs & reports, and application performance monitoring and alerts.

The most valuable features are the 

• shaper
• accelerator 
• reporting.

The first of those is a shaper and not a policer. What I mean by that is it will shape the traffic better than, for example, a Cisco, because it's more gentle on the shaping side of things. Suppose you were selling a 20-meg link. Because you can shape to the Nth degree of traffic, the 20-meg link feels like about a 30 to 40-meg link.

We also use the Exinda dashboard to see what's happening in our network. Most of the time we would provide that type of information to the customer, so they can see for themselves what's going on. But on our end, it helps us to see if a spate of traffic is going in one direction, or if a whole bunch of weird packets are in there during Windows updates. A great example is that last Friday there were a whole bunch of Google phone updates. We could see that people were upgrading firmware on a remote island. The customer was saying they had bad bandwidth. We could tell them, "Hey, it's just Google updates. You can disable it, but that may cause other issues."

The most valuable feature is the ability to provide very granular classes of service. That's important because it allows us to prioritize certain traffic types over others, to a very granular level. It allows us to really control what the priority applications are, from a connectivity point of view. And we can do it very quickly as well, which is something we wouldn't be able to do with a third-party WAN provider.

The most valuable feature is the ability to manage the traffic at the application layer. It makes things a lot easier. We're not digging for port numbers and IP addresses and different services. We're able to say, "We need to make sure that Zoom is a priority for faculty." It makes us far more responsive in our ability to do things and speed up the process. We're a very small shop, so having something that's straightforward and easy to use is a big help.

The fact that we are more responsive is a big thing for us because, with the packet shaping solution we used to have, it took a lot of work to do anything. This is far more straightforward and easy to do.

It gives you the visibility into the things that you're doing, and you get suggestions as well. That's helpful. Every time there's a shift in what the population is doing, the Exinda recommends, "Hey, we're seeing a lot of Dropbox traffic. You don't have a rule for that. You should probably think about doing that." I also use it to watch the traffic on the internet. We have a few options for doing that, but one of the easiest is through the Exinda dashboard and the real-time monitoring.

One of the nice things that Exinda has enabled us to do is to set up the monitoring of certain things. We can monitor the response to our webpage. We can also monitor our different systems—some are cloud-based, some are here—and create service levels for monitoring so that we ensure that critical systems are up, running, and responding appropriately. 

Everybody is moving everything to the cloud. When they wanted to move our website from on-prem to the cloud, in the initial testing people were saying, "Well, it's a little slower," and I said, "Well, of course it's slower, because when you're on campus, you're not leaving to go to the internet to get to the webpage." I was actually able to show metrics of why that was and how. We still monitor that. It didn't ultimately change anybody's mind, but at least we were able to say, "You can't have the same level of service from the cloud that you get on-prem."

The most valuable feature is the ability to create policies where we can tailor them to the customer. It enables us to prioritize apps and users for bandwidth.

Exinda allows us to see what's happening with our network and apps. We can actually monitor stuff in real-time. 

The most valuable feature is the WAN management feature. You have WAN channel and with Exinda you can have throughput management on that channel. You may have solutions that connect to other sides of your business or to the cloud, for example, and you can know exactly what every solution uses which part of the throughput. Exinda can show you which product uses how much throughput and can help you manage it. You can use Exinda as a network orchestrator so you can be sure that the throughput is managed well and everything gets what it needs. You can choose to put 90% for business-critical applications and leave 10% for not critical applications and Exinda will manage this for you. It will dynamically change the throughput limits depending on how business-critical apps are using the WAN channel. If these apps need 90% they'll get it. But if they need only 50% (less than 90%) of WAN channel width, non-critical applications limits will be dynamically improved.

Policy based shaping