Riverbed Digital Experience Management

Today, most businesses realize that in order to attract and retain customers, they must develop and deliver high-quality digital services—and do so faster and more efficiently than their competitors.

Results from the 2016 Gartner CIO Survey show that two-thirds of organizations are currently actively investing in digital operations1. Digital capabilities will continue to be a top investment for the foreseeable future, as the industry expects digital revenue to increase by 80% by 2020.

While new technologies and business models are transforming companies, the real drivers of this digital era are end users and their expectations for richer, more powerful experiences. Therefore, for IT and business leaders, a keen focus on the end user experience, from application design to application delivery and consumption, is critical to success.

challenge

Make no mistake: delivering these premium digital experiences is easier said than done. As users expect more sophisticated, engaging, and reliable digital services, the bar for quality service is rising. Unfortunately, organizations must balance these rising expectations with increasingly complex, fragmented, and ineffective management IT tools and limited business insights. To be truly successful, IT leaders must meet the following challenges:

(1) Complex service delivery chains lead to more business impact issues: Today’s digital services span local and cloud resources, are delivered over hybrid networks that include private and public networks, and must be optimized for multiple device types. In addition, the increasing reliance on microservices, containers, and other third-party components means that today’s application topologies are more distributed and dynamic than ever before.

This complex chain of interactions means that digital services are only as fragile as their weakest link. Any flaw—whether a server failure, coding issue, network congestion, or device problem—can cause applications to slow down and disrupt the ultimate digital experience. Even the smallest impact can have dramatic consequences: a 1-second delay on Amazon’s e-commerce site is estimated to cost $1.6 billion in lost annual revenue

(2) Fragmented tools and IT silos lead to increased crashes and other inefficiencies: A cross-domain understanding of applications, networks, infrastructure, and the devices they run on is critical to managing digital experiences. Yet, 64% of companies still take a fragmented approach to digital experience monitoring and troubleshooting4, where each IT domain uses its own tools to manage its own portion of the application delivery chain.

This approach creates IT silos and an unproductive environment where teams pass the buck and problems often take months to find and fix. As a result, teams spend too much time dealing with problems and not enough time on more strategic initiatives.

(3) Aggressive development strategies strain teams and degrade digital service quality: Most organizations adopt DevOps and other agile methodologies to rapidly and continuously develop and deliver new or improved digital services. However, shortening development and release cycles means little if new features are buggy and perform poorly for users.

Furthermore, as feature sets grow, code often develops defects. Relying on testing processes in a lab environment to discover potential issues is insufficient. Such practices take a lot of time and are not representative of real-world situations, where thousands of people use applications simultaneously. As a result, change rates continue to rise, service levels are reduced or stopped, and both IT teams and end users become frustrated.

(4) Limited insights hinder planning and future development efforts: Measuring the success of digital capabilities is critical to making informed planning decisions and cost-controlled future investments. In the past, IT focused on metrics such as “availability” and “response time,” which are important indicators of service quality. However, these metrics do not report performance from the end user’s perspective, nor do they explain what role digital services play in the company’s bottom line.

Without these insights, it is difficult for application owners to understand how users are engaging with digital services, or determine the overall impact of digital services on the business. This in turn can hinder future development or improvement efforts.

Figure 1: Multiple potential causes of poor digital experience

Multiple factors can impact the performance of today’s complex application delivery chains, leading to subpar digital experiences and negative business outcomes.

Solution

To succeed, business and IT leaders need a complete, integrated solution that enables them to proactively and completely manage the end-user digital experience across the software development lifecycle and the infrastructure on which digital applications and services run.

Riverbed's Digital Experience Management (DEM) solution provides end-to-end monitoring and proactive performance insights, enabling companies to measure, evaluate, and improve the business impact of today's digital experiences. The result: consistently high user satisfaction and faster innovation with fewer issues.

Get a holistic view of digital experience

You need a complete view of how your applications and digital services are performing—across all locations and devices. This includes gaining insights from the most important perspective—the user’s perspective. Riverbed’s solutions provide this complete picture by:

• Capture powerful and detailed performance analytics across all applications, networks, infrastructure, and end-user devices to ensure there are no blind spots in the end-to-end service delivery chain.
• Blending and correlating these metrics into role-specific dashboards provides digital stakeholders with the actionable intelligence they need to make faster, more informed decisions.
• Measure user usage and behavior over time, down to the individual transaction, by translating usage and performance metrics into impact on productivity, revenue, and user satisfaction.

Figure 2: Riverbed DEM Platform

Riverbed offers the industry's most complete digital experience solution, delivering actionable intelligence to business executives across all areas of IT.

Continuously deliver high-performance digital services

Performance issues can occur at any time. Riverbed can help you resolve them quickly before your business is impacted by:

• Detect problems as they occur with continuous full-stack monitoring and behavioral analytics that alert teams to SLA violations or deviations from normal performance levels.
• Provides a centralized view of performance and common insights to improve collaboration across teams, guide root cause analysis, and significantly reduce mean time to resolution.
• Provides an up-to-date view of application structure through automated dependency mapping that can reveal issues or validate changes when they occur.
• Improve operational efficiency with REST APIs that allow teams to quickly and flexibly respond to alerts using common collaboration tools and automatically open tickets in incident management tools.

“Riverbed provides us with a development cycle that helps us respond quickly, inspires us to be proactive, encourages us to anticipate the future and then enables us to get ahead of it. This technology will also underpin digital initiatives for other brands within the Maersk Group, powered by MGIS.”

—Andy Laurence, Head of Production Services, Maersk Group

Figure 3: Lifecycle insights for higher quality releases

Riverbed can help you keep up with aggressive release schedules while maintaining quality and optimizing performance. We can also help you measure end-user experience, identify changing usage trends, and quantify the business impact of your digital product service portfolio.

Enable frequent, high-impact releases

Seizing opportunities to develop new or improved features is critical to improving customer satisfaction and retention. Riverbed solutions provide business-relevant insights to help you prioritize development efforts, build new features faster, and ensure that all updates continue to meet user and business needs by:

• Identify which features need fine-tuning with rich performance graphs that pinpoint underperforming or underutilized features.
• Quickly identify and eliminate defects during development with detailed diagnostics to uncover code-level issues.
• Integrate with DevOps tools via REST API to accelerate data collection, sharing, and analysis during build and pre-deployment testing.
• Predict application behavior in various environments and troubleshoot issues to ensure releases are optimized for production.