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Tag: Riverbed

  • Riverbed Unveils Unified Observability Platform

    Riverbed Unveils Unified Observability Platform

    Riverbed today launched a beta of a unified observability platform it will make available under the Alluvio by Riverbed brand name.

    Jim Hansen, senior vice president for product management at Riverbed, said the Alluvio by Riverbed observability platform combines several existing network and application performance management platforms into a single offering that is now infused with machine learning algorithms to provide deeper insights into IT environments.

    The goal is to provide an open observability platform that can not only aggregate data collected from both Riverbed and third-party offerings but also identify the best ways to resolve an IT issue, added Hansen.

    Scheduled to be generally available later this year, the Alluvio by Riverbed observability platform will differ from existing observability platforms in that it will enable IT teams to not just identify the root cause of an IT issue, but also note which processes should be employed to resolve it, he said.

    With this launch, Riverbed is attempting to reposition itself. Previously, the company offered network and application performance management platforms alongside a wide range of network software and hardware. Each of those offerings is now a source of data that can be fed into the Alluvio by Riverbed observability platform, noted Hansen.

    Observability, of course, has always been a core tenet of any DevOps best practice. Achieving that goal, however, has proven to be elusive. Most of the IT monitoring tools used today are designed to track a set of pre-defined metrics. Whenever there is an issue, IT teams typically convene in a war room where they try to uncover the root cause of, for example, a performance issue by comparing reports and the various dashboards generated by monitoring tools. It can take weeks to discover an issue that often only takes a few minutes to fix once the source of the problem is identified.

    In contrast, observability platforms promise to reduce the time required to discover IT issues by aggregating all the data generated by the IT environment within a single platform that correlates events and makes it easier to identify anomalous behavior. Armed with those insights, it becomes a lot simpler for IT teams to launch queries that enable them to resolve issues faster.

    Those insights are also increasingly being used to drive business decisions as organizations become more dependent on software to drive digital business transformation initiatives. However, a recent survey conducted by Riverbed finds three-quarters of business decision-makers (75%) said their organizations struggle to glean actionable insights from data generated by their technology infrastructure.

    The challenge IT teams inevitably encounter is they don’t always know the right questions to ask, which is an issue that can be addressed by machine learning algorithms capable of identifying anomalies indicative of an IT issue that needs to be resolved.

    There already is no shortage of observability platforms. The issue now is determining which observability platform to employ across a distributed IT environment that is becoming more instrumented with each passing day.

  • Riverbed Aims to Unify App, Network Performance Management

    Riverbed Aims to Unify App, Network Performance Management

    Much of the initial focus on DevOps has been on accelerating the rate at which applications are built and deployed. But once those applications are deployed, it’s not too long before the focus shifts to the quality of the end-user experience. Aiming to make it easier to determine what the quality of that experience really is, Riverbed Technology has launched a Digital Experience Management initiative based on the SteelCentral management platform.

    Erik Hille, director of product marketing for Riverbed, says the latest release of SteelCentral provides tighter integration between SteelCentral Portal and the SteelCentral Aternity end-user monitoring tool and SteelCentral AppInternals, an application performance management (APM) platform. The goal, says Hille, is to make it easier for an organization to holistically manage individual end-user experience by correlating information at the device, network and application levels. As part of that effort, Riverbed also has integrated the workflow between SteelCentral Aternity and AppInternals to create an integrated monitoring system.

    Hille says IT operations teams can use a comprehensive approach to managing digital experiences that can be set up in fewer than 10 days. Once in place, IT operations teams can more quickly identify the root cause of any issue by correlating application, device and networking data through a single pane of glass. In addition, Riverbed is employing REST APIs to make it possible to consume alerts generated by collaboration tools such as Slack and HipChat. IT operations teams can not only automatically open incident management tickets, but also collect additional metrics via those APIs.

    Riverbed is also providing integration between NetProfiler, a network performance monitoring tool, and NetIM, a network device management tool, to provide more visibility into how network infrastructure impacts network performance.

    Hille notes that most IT operations teams are swiveling between different sets of tools to correlate the same information. The problem is that as more organizations strive to become a digital business, any performance issue has a direct impact on customer satisfaction and the amount of revenue being generated. Faced with that increased business pressure, Hille says IT organizations need to re-evaluate legacy approaches to IT operations based on silos. The goal should be to implement a more proactive approach to IT focused on proactively preventing issues from occurring or escalating, versus merely reacting to isolated events as they occur.

    One of the few things in DevOps that developers and IT professionals can agree on is that whenever there’s an issue, it’s the fault of the network guy. That’s not always true, but it does take networking professionals a long time to prove their innocence. Until then, there’s a tendency to assume their guilty until proven otherwise. Obviously, that kind of bias isn’t in keeping with the whole spirit of integrated DevOps. A more comprehensive approach to application and networking performance management should go a long way toward reducing the amount of finger-pointing inside any organization.

    There will never be a perfect IT environment. The goal is to discover issues before the end-user notices—and, failing that, resolve that issue in as little time as possible. Any argument about what exactly happened to cause the problem can occur at a later date and time.

    — Mike Vizard