Managing the Digital Experience with Riverbed SteelCentral

It’s the age of digital business. Two-thirds of companies are investing in digital business. Digital capabilities and information technology were the top two investments by CEOs in 2016, and by 2020, the percentage of companies with advanced digital transformation programs will more than double.

Digital business is driving the unprecedented convergence of people, commerce and things. It disrupts traditional business models and the traditional technologies that support them. From a human perspective, this convergence is called the “digital experience.”

Managing the digital experience is critical to the future success of the enterprise. By 2020, at least 30 billion end-user devices will be connected to the Internet. CEOs expect digital revenue to grow by more than 80% by 2020, and 89% of business will be centered around the customer experience. Lack of breadth of application support

Furthermore, most companies lack the tools, technology and training for effective digital experience monitoring (DEM). Gartner research shows that only 5% of enterprises worldwide have strategically implemented DEM technology. More than a third (34%) of CIOs say the IT skills gap is a major barrier to achieving their goals, especially the skills required for new real-time data scenarios and advanced analytics. Ineffective DEM can be extremely costly.

• 78% of organizations experience inconsistencies in the quality of their digital experiences.
• 60% of business leaders say poor digital experience quality leads to a significant decrease in productivity of at least 31%.
• An e-commerce site that is just one second slower can cost up to $1.6 billion in lost sales each year.
• An average broker who lags 5 milliseconds behind competitors on their trading platform could lose $4 million in revenue for every millisecond.

Of course, digital experiences are enabled by underlying technologies. Therefore, the quality of digital experiences is determined by the performance of those technologies, both independently and influencing each other in a complex chain of events.

Digital services are only as good as their weakest link. Applications and digital services comprise a complex chain of interactions that includes applications, data, networks, infrastructure components, and devices, and are only as good as their weakest link.

All parts of the application are links in this chain, and these links must be seamlessly connected through a complex hybrid IT environment that includes both cloud and on-premises components, connected through a mix of private and public networks.

Any grain of sand in the gears, any tiny flaw in the infrastructure, whether it’s a server failure, an issue within the code, a problematic database, network latency, or user device compatibility, can cause an application to slow down or crash completely. There are many potential causes for a poor digital experience (Figure 1).

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Figure 1 Various reasons for poor digital experience

However, enterprises are ill-equipped to address poor digital experience issues. It is still common to take a war room approach to performance issues. As a method of troubleshooting, war rooms are reactive in nature. Companies set up war rooms to address application performance issues that cannot be resolved quickly.

A cross-disciplinary team of IT engineers responsible for network performance, application performance, and end-user experience work together to find the root cause of problems and fix them. The trouble is, each discipline typically has its own set of performance management tools that provide only fragmented visibility. This results in IT being trapped in silos. The end result is often finger-pointing between silos, with each discipline trying to pass the buck. “It’s not my domain’s problem, it must be yours”

SteelCentral Solutions

To deliver exceptional digital experiences across complex infrastructure components, you need comprehensive visibility. To achieve this, you need to take two steps.

1. Collect all data from all areas for analysis, all the time. An integrated visibility architecture that enables unified performance monitoring across end-user, network, infrastructure, and application areas. SteelCentral is the only solution that covers this holistic approach.

Integrated visibility across your entire application and service delivery architecture is the only way to address all potential root causes of issues and ensure a high-quality digital experience.

2. Provide an integrated view of digital experience performance by blending end-to-end performance monitoring data and analytical data from different domains in a common user interface, making it easy to share and customize across technical disciplines and stakeholders, while drilling down into any performance issues in a responsive and proactive manner. SteelCentral combines the breadth of monitoring with the depth of analysis to present customized views based on role (Figure 2)

Exceptional digital experiences require seamless integration between devices, networks, infrastructure, and applications. Achieving this requires comprehensive visibility, which requires end-to-end integrated performance monitoring across the enterprise, presented on a single pane of glass for easy action by any role.

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Figure 2 SteelCentral Platform

This comprehensive, integrated approach to enterprise digital experience management offers several key benefits:

• Capture all data and transactions from all end-user devices, networks, infrastructure, and applications at a more granular level to enable faster and more effective root cause analysis. Devices and applications can vary widely, but everything in the environment must be supported.
• Provides fully integrated in-depth performance reporting that consolidates and correlates all areas of analysis, providing a one-stop solution for managing your entire digital service.
• Detect and fix problems before they impact business, and use deep analytics to guide the repair, optimization, and prioritization of application and network performance for hybrid and SD-WAN architectures.
• Measure, understand, and remediate the business impact of poor digital experiences caused by poor application performance.
• Provide role-specific insights to each stakeholder through custom dashboard views, making them accessible to both non-technical line-of-business managers and technical professionals.

SteelCentral Solution Components

SteelCentral is an integrated and modular solution that can be used to provide overall digital experience management, while any component can be used independently (Figure 3) to solve specific problems. This protects investment because the solution can be expanded at any time to provide additional breadth, depth or capacity.

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Figure 3 SteelCentral components

End-user experience and application performance monitoring

1. SteelCentral Aternity

Aternity monitors the end-user experience of every enterprise application running on any physical, virtual or mobile device. Aternity enables users to quickly diagnose and resolve end-user issues and optimize the productivity of technology-dependent employees.

Enterprises can leverage Aternity's user-centric approach to detect performance issues, resolve them faster, and achieve the service levels required by the business through real-time understanding and analysis of user behavior. Aternity can be deployed via SaaS or on-premises.

2. SteelCentral Portal

SteelCentral Portal consolidates data from all SteelCentral components to provide centralized, dynamic information about the enterprise's digital experience and application performance environment.

This holistic view provides operations teams with a single source of truth for end-user experience and application performance, accelerating troubleshooting and providing actionable data to stakeholders across the enterprise.

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3. SteelCentral AppInternals

AppInternals monitors application health to provide users with application performance visibility and powerful analytics to help improve application performance, user experience, and business impact.

AppInternals tracks every transaction from the end-user device or browser to the backend application, while capturing real-time system metrics in production environments. This provides users with multiple perspectives into the end-user experience, demographics, and application performance, while providing easy workflows for root cause analysis and problem detection.

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4. SteelCentral AppResponse (application monitoring)

AppResponse provides powerful, flexible network and application analytics and workflows to accelerate problem diagnosis and resolution. SteelCentral AppResponse provides out-of-the-box functionality with predefined drill-downs and rich performance metrics to help you answer questions quickly. It combines application analytics and end-user experience monitoring in one solution, giving you everything you need to quickly resolve performance issues, right at your fingertips.

Network and infrastructure performance monitoring

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1. SteelCentral Portal

SteelCentral Portal consolidates data from all SteelCentral components to provide centralized, dynamic information about the enterprise network, infrastructure, and UC performance.

This holistic view provides operations teams with a single source of truth for network, infrastructure and UC application performance, accelerating troubleshooting and providing actionable data to stakeholders across the enterprise.

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2. SteelCentral NetProfiler

NetProfiler is a centralized reporting and analysis console that lets you quickly understand network performance and resolve issues before end users notice a problem. It combines network flow data with packet-based performance metrics to provide proactive monitoring, analysis, and reporting.

NetProfiler leverages automated discovery and dependency mapping to understand the application services in your environment, and automated behavioral analysis to establish a baseline of normal performance and provide instant alerts when changes occur, often before users even notice a degradation.

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3. SteelCentral AppResponse (Network Forensics)

SteelCentral AppResponse provides network forensics and historical analysis in a single solution, giving you everything you need to quickly resolve performance issues, right at your fingertips. It passively monitors the network and collects packets for continuous, real-time and historical monitoring and fast troubleshooting. It indexes and stores packets so that no file transfer is required when performing forensic analysis.

By continuously logging packets traversing the network, you can gain rich troubleshooting details when needed, saving time and money by minimizing the impact of downtime on business productivity and reducing or avoiding business-stopping failures or outages.

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4. SteelCentral NetIM

NetIM is a holistic solution for mapping, monitoring, and troubleshooting infrastructure components.

It helps companies capture infrastructure topology, detect performance issues, map application network paths, draw network diagrams, and troubleshoot infrastructure issues.

As an integrated component of the SteelCentral platform, customers can leverage it to manage architectural issues as an integral part of hybrid performance management.

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5. SteelCentral UCExpert

UCExpert monitors and troubleshoots the performance of your unified communications environment.

The solution provides a multivendor, multitenant user interface that supports Microsoft Skype for Business (formerly Lync), Cisco and Avaya, and provides an at-a-glance view of overall UC performance when multiple UC solutions are deployed.

Therefore, you can quickly prove your investment by understanding UC performance adoption and usage, identifying the root cause of network degradation, device errors or user errors, and reducing the number of escalations by making desktop support more self-sufficient.

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