Latest version of Riverbed SteelCentral performance monitoring platform released

Riverbed Technology recently announced that the latest version of Riverbed SteelCentral has significantly enhanced its digital experience management (DEM) platform to help enterprises ensure digital service performance and optimize user experience. Whether the service components are on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment, Riverbed can extend the functionality and services of the entire DEM, thereby improving customers' ability to manage and troubleshoot the entire digital experience chain. Riverbed has discussed and demonstrated the new solution at an industry event held on November 2nd dedicated to accelerating digital transformation by leveraging cloud networking, security, and visualization.

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The new version of SteelCentral extends DEM capabilities in the following ways:

Create a seamless link between end-user experience and network performance management

Accelerate the DevOps application lifecycle through improved container monitoring and rich application performance troubleshooting capabilities

Adapt to the big data needs brought about by digital transformation

Accelerate DEM transformation with new Performance Command Center (PCC) for AWS and Azure

SteelCentral Aternity integrates with Service Now to significantly improve first call resolution

“Many organizations don’t understand how all of the infrastructure, network, application, cloud and end-user device factors within their environment impact the end-user experience, yet they are tasked with becoming more agile and faster in delivering critical digital services to customers and employees,” said Mike Sargent, senior vice president and general manager of SteelCentral at Riverbed. “The new release of SteelCentral advances our vision to provide comprehensive visibility to optimize performance across the entire digital service chain and enable business growth.”

Seamlessly manage every aspect of the digital experience

The new version of SteelCentral expands the interoperability of the digital experience management platform, making it easier for enterprises to achieve seamless monitoring workflows between end-user experience and network performance. When investigating performance issues, SteelCentral users can analyze the health of devices, applications, networks, or infrastructure in a seamless workflow. With this upgrade, Riverbed SteelCentral has consolidated its position as the only solution that can seamlessly manage all aspects of the digital experience. In addition, SteelCentral Aternity has also been newly integrated with IT service management leader ServiceNow to create a closed-loop troubleshooting ticketing solution that automatically generates tickets if certain performance exceeds thresholds and provides top professional support personnel with rich performance information, greatly improving the level of first-call resolution.

LORD Corporation, a leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance adhesive products, is now benefiting from Riverbed SteelCentral Aternity and plans to deploy this new enhanced version to create a seamless link between end-user experience and network performance management.

“In our company, we need to understand not only what service levels are, but also whether they are operating as expected,” said Etienne Provencher, Global IT Enterprise Architect at LORD. “By deploying Riverbed SteelCentral Aternity and Riverbed SteelCentral NetProfiler, we have been able to deliver on the promise of understanding both the user experience for business-critical applications and the health of the global network for enterprise services. As a globally responsible IT department, our next goal is to integrate these two important data points into a single view. This will help us maintain a high-quality end-to-end user experience by delivering consistent business capabilities to the enterprise in a cost-optimized, centralized on-premises and cloud-delivered service landscape.”

A new approach to container monitoring for DevOps

The popularity of containerized application development methods has fundamentally changed DevOps, which requires agility and flexibility when companies release, manage and solve new digital service problems. The new version of SteelCentral introduces a new container monitoring method that manages container and application performance without modifying the container image itself. This allows enterprises to measure a range of containerized applications without development teams having to modify the way they build applications and containers. This new dynamic method can also transparently collaborate with container orchestrators like Kubernetes or Swarm.

In addition, the new version of SteelCentral introduces the ability to "piece together" application log messages in application performance data in a complete end-to-end transaction record for each transaction. The enhanced tracking and log data greatly simplifies the work of solving performance problems and application errors. Application development/support personnel can search log messages and find each application activity that generates a log message. In addition, they can perform application tracking and accurately locate the location in the call stack where the message is generated. Without this ability, engineers would have to use a silo log analysis solution and then spend hours trying to correlate log messages, code, and APM data.

Managing network performance in large-scale, high-volume environments

As digital transformation progresses, the prevalence of big data environments has fundamentally changed the network environment of many companies. Industries such as financial services, healthcare, retail, and government rely on robust network environments to ensure their daily operations, but maintaining performance and continuity in such environments is a mission-critical challenge.

The new version of Riverbed SteelCentral greatly improves the company's ability to manage network performance in large-scale, high-capacity environments by improving the ability to collect network information and improve process elasticity. By introducing a 40G NIC card for several Riverbed devices, enterprises can grasp network performance faster. In addition, SteelCentral will double the processing traffic, processing 20 million de-weighted traffic per minute or 200 million raw traffic per minute, so that information can be processed and analyzed more comprehensively. Riverbed has also added new features that can centrally manage large-scale NPM environments and make global changes as needed. As a result, companies with large-scale, high-capacity requirements for NPM can manage performance more coordinated and flexibly.

New Performance Command Center Modular Services

As companies begin to manage DEM performance, finding solutions to performance problems can be a major obstacle to successful management. In the new version of SteelCentral, Riverbed is helping customers mitigate risks by introducing the Performance Command Center (PCC). This flexible, modular service is designed to help companies leverage Riverbed's expertise to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. This modular product covers all performance areas of SteelCentral, including end users, networks, applications, and infrastructure, and provides flexible implementation and delivery models that can be deployed within the company, on Amazon Web Services, or on Microsoft Azure. Similarly, services can also be provided to customers or partners by Riverbed or its service department.

“Our extensive research at EMA has determined that network operations professionals consider end-user experience visibility to be an essential feature of a network performance management solution. If they cannot gain end-user intelligence through their core NPM solution, they often integrate their network management system with a dedicated end-user experience monitoring tool,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, senior analyst at EMA. “The new release of Riverbed SteelCentral further solidifies its leadership in end-user and digital experience management, especially with the integration of its Aternity and NetProfiler products, addressing key needs of network operations teams and end-user support teams. Overall, Riverbed leads the industry in the breadth of intelligence and integration from an end-user perspective, and is more flexible in how it ingests network and application performance data, and whether it’s bandwidth optimization, ITSM incident remediation, or deep application diagnostics, the new SteelCentral release can turn it into actionable results.”