An example method includes receiving, by a software-defined networking in a wide area network (SD-WAN) system having a first WAN link and a second WAN link for an SD-WAN service, WAN link characterization data for the first WAN link over a time period; determining, by the SD-WAN system based on processing the WAN link characterization data for the first WAN link using a machine learning model trained with historical WAN link characterization data for one or more WAN links, an indicator of a predicted performance metric of the first WAN link at a future time; and reassigning, by the SD-WAN system based on the indicator, an application from the first WAN link to the second WAN link.