Riverbed updates Digital Experience Management solution

Riverbed has introduced the latest release of its Digital Experience Management (DEM) solution Riverbed SteelCentral, with advancements that dramatically improve the performance of cloud applications. The new release fundamentally changes performance management for cloud architectures with greater visibility of cloud native apps and into cloud-based networks—through the introduction of new Application Performance Management (APM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) capabilities. Today’s announcement further strengthens the industry’s most comprehensive DEM solution, which unifies device-based end user experience, application, and network monitoring to provide the business with a holistic view to truly measure and manage the digital experience.  

Cloud adoption is enabling massive business transformation and tremendous growth for today’s digital business, but it also creates huge visibility gaps and span of control challenges for organisations. While hybrid architectures are a reality for most modern enterprises and cloud is now considered an extension of the enterprise infrastructure, the majority of performance management tools available in the market are incapable of providing unified and user-centric visibility for hybrid cloud environments and the user’s digital experience.  In the 2018 State of Cloud Monitoring Survey recently conducted by Riverbed, IT network and cloud business decision makers shared their difficulties with 92% of participants stating they faced challenges with performance management in their cloud environment, and 60% of participants stated that their end users experienced cloud performance issues first before companies knew about them.

With this release of SteelCentral, Riverbed is introducing a new, comprehensive approach to monitor cloud performance that enables enterprises to monitor the digital experience of every application, in any cloud environment.

“As cloud adoption has become ubiquitous, cloud deployments and the applications themselves have become increasingly complex and distributed. Ensuring performance of the end-user experience, apps, networks and cloud vendors themselves is a daunting challenge,” said Mike Sargent, Senior Vice President, General Manager for SteelCentral at Riverbed. “This latest release of Riverbed SteelCentral delivers rich visibility into both the application and network performance of hybrid and cloud environments, as well as the most comprehensive approach to truly measure and manage the digital experience. With our end user experience focus and supporting big data platform, Riverbed SteelCentral is delivering end-to-end performance monitoring at a scale unmatched by any other vendor.”

“Public cloud continues to make inroads, with our research showing that 41% of enterprises are heavily using public cloud and 72% of those users are deploying in multi-cloud environments. So, it is of no surprise that 60% of organisations anticipate that they will invest in cloud services monitoring and visibility over the next two years,” Rohit Mehra, Vice President, Network Infrastructure, at IDC. “The latest release of Riverbed SteelCentral offers companies a new and comprehensive approach for visibility into the application and network performance of hybrid and cloud environments. This is timely as we are seeing a rapid increase in the need for solutions that provide better cloud app performance and visibility.”

The new SteelCentral release features significant enhancements to its core solutions:

• Packet visibility in the cloud – the new release of a AppResponse Cloud solution collects and analyses packet information for Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployments.

• Flow visibility in the cloud – SteelCentral NetProfiler’s capabilities extended to monitor flow across cloud environments and between the cloud and the enterprise.

• App visibility for today’s cloud native apps – introduction of AppInternals integrations with Kubernetes, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift to help companies maintain visibility as applications are developed and implemented in the cloud, and manage the complexity of the modern multi-stack app ecosystem.

“CenterPoint's mission is to serve our customers' complex industrial property logistics and infrastructure needs as well as create sustainable jobs and build communities,” said Beverly Maestas, VP of Technology Operations at CenterPoint. “Our digital transformation initiatives are a critical component of this mission and leveraging the cloud is core to our strategy. Riverbed SteelCentral’s new capabilities will enable us to monitor our network performance across our hybrid environment and provide unified visibility into applications, logs, networks and systems. The resulting visibility to performance in the cloud will give us clarity into our initiatives and the impact they have on our customer base.”

Enhanced Cloud Native APM Visibility for Kubernetes, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift

The pressure from digital transformation initiatives has fundamentally shifted how companies develop, implement and manage their application environment. Not only do companies need to ensure that these business-critical initiatives realise their targeted benefits for the enterprise, but they need to do so in an increasingly portable, ephemeral environment. As companies accelerate application development with microservices architectures and composable applications, they are increasingly adopting solutions such as Kubernetes, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift for container and application orchestration and delivery.

SteelCentral APM takes a scalable big data approach that is fully adapted to the cloud native ecosystem. With this new release, AppInternals, SteelCentral’s APM solution, significantly enhances its support for modern cloud-based application architectures with full visibility into transactions, containers, and services running within Kubernetes, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift. SteelCentral APM helps companies running applications in Docker containers and Pivotal Cloud Foundry, to reduce performance issues and drive better user adoption.

Moreover, with Riverbed’s partnership and integration into the Pivotal stack, application teams can easily and painlessly deploy Riverbed's distributed application tracing into Pivotal’s cloud-native platform to ensure application performance, customer satisfaction and retention while driving more stable application releases.

“Over one-third of the Fortune 100 companies rely on Pivotal. Monitoring application performance accurately is the foundation of delivering high-quality software,” said Nima Badiey, Head of Technology Partnerships at Pivotal. “Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals for PCF delivers end-to-end insight into applications running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. It preserves diagnostic details for executed transactions, even in large-scale enterprise deployments, helping users resolve issues before they affect customers and the business.”

New NPM Approach for Hybrid Cloud

This release introduces the first cloud NPM solution that can both look broadly across cloud network traffic and deeply examine cloud network interactions. Utilizing both flow and packet-based approaches to network performance management (NPM), companies can build on existing on-premises expertise but now extend it to cloud environments. New NPM features include:

• The ability to implement the SteelCentral AppResponse virtual appliance as an Amazon EC2 instance in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

• New reporting capabilities that enable companies to investigate cloud network performance in conjunction with on-premise network performance to provide an overarching view of the hybrid enterprise.

• The extension of SteelCentral Agent to collect both packet and flow information in the cloud. This agent builds upon Riverbed’s single license strategy which enables companies to redeploy the agent across NPM, APM and end user experience management (EUEM).