Riverbed Acquires Aternity to Extend Monitoring Portfolio

How to Monitor Networks While On Vacation

Most IT organizations don’t have a lack of tools for monitoring various aspects of their IT environments. But correlating all that information into something that represents actionable IT intelligence is often a whole other matter.

To expand its portfolio of performance monitoring solutions, Riverbed Technology has acquired Aternity. Nik Koutsoukos, senior director of product marketing for SteelCentral monitoring tools at Riverbed, says Aternity will perfectly complement and extend the SteelCentral portfolio. Acquiring Aternity provides Riverbed with the last mile it needs to enable IT organizations to correlate an actual end user application experience with all the alerts being generated via its network and application performance monitoring tools, says Koutsoukos.

Of course, the challenge with monitoring any kind of endpoint these days is that the compute footprint is relatively small. IT organizations can’t deploy agent software that will consume resources in a way that has an adverse effect on the end-user experience. Koutsoukos says Aternity has addressed this issue by coming up with agent software that is more lightweight than what has traditionally been associated with monitoring tools.

Monitoring endpoints, of course, is more challenging also because there are now so many of them. In addition, the variants of those endpoints span any number of types of mobile computing devices, and with the Internet of Things (IoT) on the horizon, there will be even more devices to be monitored.

In the meantime, IT organizations would be well-advised to revisit their performance monitoring strategies. If their daily existence is characterized by continually swiveling their chair between different monitors in the hopes of gleaning some insight into what end users are experiencing, chances are that whatever conclusion they come up with will be a best guess. Senior business leaders are making it clear they expect much more from their internal IT organizations. Instead of just hearing there is a problem, they want to know what the IT organization already did to fix it.

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