R. Performance Routing has two major components: Master Controller (MC): Apply verification, policy etc. Border Router (BR): Visibility into forwarding Path. Optimized by some of the following factors: Jitter Delay Throughput Path Trace Flow Analysis of APIC-EM or Path Trace allows path trace from one host to the other giving real time visibility into the entire path the packet takes to reach out to the destination and reverse path to see If It takes the same path to reach out to the source. This inbuilt tool gives the extra advantage to the network support team to troubleshoot the issue with more granular visibility into the network. Downloaded 4/15/2022 9:44:49 AM Nova Southeastern University IP Address: 137.52.76.29 SDN Practical Orientation Features It gives the ability to trace path to the destination IP address. Support for DMVPN Support for VRF Leaking & VRF Lite. Monitor performance for the application traffic. Path trace gives the trace result with the device health status (Memory, CPU etc) of every device along the path. Source and destination IP address can be provided along with the optional information like source and destination protocols and port numbers for path trace. It gives the enhanced flow visibility from the source to the destination. APIC EM continuously collects the network elements information through SNMP traps and stores in its database. Cisco SDN Controllers like APIC and APIC EM are controllers to manage Datacenter and Enterprise architectures respectively. It also gives the leverage to manage these controllers through third party applications via northbound APIs. The tasks which used to take weeks to get implemented are deployed within minutes now. The overall benefit of using these controllers is to programmatically controlling the Infrastructure, centralized management and complete visibility along with quickly making the entire network ready for the applications to be deployed. CONCLUSION This chapter primarily focusses on software defined network theoretical and practical approa