Monitoring a branch

[Neeb]

We are running a VDI infrastructure and are have random issues with screens going black. It is not the same machine, user or time or even branch on any given day. Is there a way to monitor all the branch traffic for say a day, to see if there is a drop in packets somewhere that is causing this problem? It is only the people who are working in the office that are having this issue at a couple of branches. We are not having these issues at the home office or the closer branches. 

Is there a way to monitor the traffic coming from our home office to a branch office for say, a day? We have MX95's, MS425's and MS225's. Any ideas? I am not real familiar with Meraki.

Thanks

[Mloraditch]

Given the intermittent nature and the fact that it's random clients and not even all clients at site, this is going to be hard to track down. Do your VDI clients or servers have any logs that indicate what the issue is?

I could see perhaps it being a utilization issue at the sites where it's happening and it just happens that the client in question is the one getting dropped.

Are your vdi clients capable of doing testing of any sort when the issue occurs like pings, traceroutes, etc?

For monitoring and historical information on utilization, I'd recommend something that monitors with SNMP. IMO, Outside of the live uplink monitor at the exact moment of the problem it's harder to track down historical utilization issues with the dashboard.

Something else you could do is setup traffic shaping for the VDI services to try and prevent drops: https://documentation.meraki.com/MX/Firewall_and_Traffic_Shaping/SD-WAN_and_Traffic_Shaping

[PhilipDAth]

I would be tempted to get two SD-WAN Plus licences, and apply them to the branch and the site where the VDI servers are located.

Then you can use the "Mmeraki Insight" monitoring capabilities.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MI

Failing that, check out the SD-WAN monitoring page (I am assuming that this is running over AutoVPN) and see if that reveals anything.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MX/Monitoring_and_Reporting/SD-WAN_Monitoring

[GIdenJoe]

If your traffic traverses autoVPN then my question would be.. do you have 2 ISP's per branch or only 1?
If you have 2 you can monitor latency, jitter and load on both lines and even have performance based uplink selection.  The way you monitor this is by going to VPN status and on the bottom side of the page you get the uplink decisions list.  If you have multiple links you can just click on WAN1 or WAN2 on any of the packets going towards the hub you want to check against.  And then you will get that page where you can see the stats between your local MX and remote MX on both uplinks.

Alternatively if you want to analyse per packet and CONSTANTLY.  Then you'll need to have two capture devices and do ring buffered captures on both ends of the VPN.  This means you'll have to mirror the switchport going to the MX'es on both ends.  This is laborious but will yield honest and precise results.