I was reading this bit and was wondering why they are saying their solution is application aware when they use this line "You single out data traffic of interest by matching on the Layer 3 and Layer 4 headers in the packets, including source and destination prefixes and ports, protocol, and DSCP field."
Application is layer 7 so how are they saying application aware?
Application-aware routing tracks network and path characteristics of the data plane tunnels between Cisco devices and uses the collected information to compute optimal paths for data traffic. These characteristics include packet loss, latency, and jitter, and the load, cost and bandwidth of a link.
The Cisco SD-WAN Application-Aware Routing solution consists of three elements:
Identification—You define the application of interest, and then you create a centralized data policy that maps the application to specific SLA requirements. You single out data traffic of interest by matching on the Layer 3 and Layer 4 headers in the packets, including source and destination prefixes and ports, protocol, and DSCP field. As with all centralized data policies, you configure them on a Cisco vSmart Controller, which then passes them to the appropriate Cisco devices.
Monitoring and measuring—The Cisco SD-WAN software uses BFD packets to continuously monitor the data traffic on the data plane tunnels between Cisco devices, and periodically measures the performance characteristics of the tunnel. To gauge performance, the Cisco SD-WAN software looks for traffic loss on the tunnel, and it measures latency by looking at the one-way and round-trip times of traffic traveling over the tunnel. These measurements might indicate a blackout or brownout condition.
Mapping application traffic to a specific transport tunnel—The final step is to map an application’s data traffic to the data plane tunnel that provides the desired performance for the application. The mapping decision is based on two criteria: the best-path criteria computed from measurements performed on the WAN connections and on the constraints specified in a policy specific to application-aware routing.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/routers/sdwan/configuration/policies/ios-xe-16/policies-book-xe/application-aware-routing.html#id_114079
