Riverbed Looks to Centralize IT Monitoring

When it comes to monitoring events that occur within an IT environment, there is no shortage of tools. The challenge is correlating all that data in a way that creates some actual actionable intelligence.

Riverbed today at a Riverbed Disrupt event moved to address that issue via an update to Riverbed SteelCentral that identifies how specific network performance issues impact specific end-user experiences in addition to now extending the reach of the platform into Big Data and containerized applications. Riverbed also announced that Riverbed SteelCentral can now pull data from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and share information with the service desk applications that ServiceNow provides as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

At the same time, Riverbed announced that is has extended its relationship with Zscaler to make it possible to apply policies that redirect specific classes of traffic emanating from a remote office connected via a Riverbed software-defined wide area network to the Zscaler Security Cloud service to identify potential malware.

Erik Hille, product marketing director for Riverbed, says Riverbed is positing SteelCentral as a vehicle for tracking digital experiences. Today, all the data required to achieve that goal is fragmented across too many different network and application performance monitoring tools, says Hill. Anytime something goes wrong, adds Hille, IT organizations wind up wasting an inordinate amount of time finding the source of the problem.

“IT teams wind up playing the blame game,” says Hille.

It generally takes most IT teams a few minutes to resolve an issue once it’s discovered. But the amount of time required to find the source of an issue can stretch from days to weeks. The problem today is that as more end customers interact with web and mobile applications, there’s less tolerance for applications that either crash or for some inexplicable reason respond slowly. It’s not that anyone expects applications to behave perfectly every time. But any issue that spans more than a couple of hours now reflects poorly on the organization’s brand. In effect, that means the margin of error for IT has never been smaller.