Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, today announced new enhancements to Riverbed SteelCentral that bring major advances to troubleshooting capabilities and improved monitoring across the cloud while simultaneously improving ease of use and scalability. These enhancements continue to support a common theme of improved SteelCentral platform integration while enhancing several critical capabilities, including: · extending powerful monitoring capabilities into the cloud with Microsoft Azure and AWS
· platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and containerised environments
· large-scale virtualised network performance monitoring
· expanded unified communications (UC) monitoring with new support for Skype for Business
· next generation diagnostics and troubleshooting
"This release of SteelCentral delivers significant enhancements in cloud-based performance monitoring, along with new capabilities that will help accelerate business execution and boost productivity," said Mike Sargent, SVP, General Manager of SteelCentral at Riverbed. "As more enterprises embrace digital and cloud services, SteelCentral provides the high definition visibility that is critical to enabling and assuring the success of these transformational initiatives. SteelCentral is the only performance management solution that can deliver comprehensive insight into end user experience, application, network, and infrastructure performance in a unified, central view. It truly is the command center for application performance for the digital enterprise."
Extended visibility into the cloud, PaaS and containers. In its quest to increase agility, IT is adopting cloud services and related technologies like PaaS, containers and micro-services to deliver applications faster and to ensure that they can scale as usage increases. With this release, IT can automatically scale monitoring across applications that leverage these technologies. IT Operations and development teams can visualise applications’ behaviour in real-time to troubleshoot existing issues or to proactively improve performance. Additionally, this release of SteelCentral AppInternals introduces out-of-the-box monitoring for applications deployed on Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, and will also be conveniently offered on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace for AWS customers.
Further, SteelCentral vastly improves the ability to monitor applications deployed on PaaS and containerised environments. As these environments dynamically scale during peak and off-peak periods, conventional performance monitoring tools that trace interactions between servers cannot coherently represent application behavior. This release introduces the Application Performance Graph that visually maps interactions between application modules in real-time, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. This reveals dependencies and hotspots obscured by the elasticity of the environment so that IT can observe and fix issues with the most overarching business impact.
The new Application Performance graph is beneficial for complex, multi-tier applications, especially those that rely on elastic environments. Take for example, an eCommerce site that needs to perform on Black Friday. The underlying infrastructure will need to scale up to support the high traffic during the peak shopping time. In these cases, the application topology is often transient, nebulous, and unpredictably interrelated with countless other applications and services. To truly understand application behavior, we need to observe interactions between application modules, regardless of the underlying infrastructure, to identify hotspots and to prioritize performance improvement efforts that will have the maximum business impact. Current APM approaches simply overlay application performance views over server topology. In contrast, SteelCentral tracks and graphs interactions between application modules in real-time.
