Riverbed Technology has announced new enhancements to Riverbed SteelCentral. These enhancements continue to support a common theme of improved SteelCentral platform integration while enhancing several critical capabilities, including:
- Extending powerful monitoring capabilities into the cloud with Microsoft Azure and AWS
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and containerised environments
- Large-scale virtualised network performance monitoring
- Expanded unified communications (UC) monitoring with new support for Skype for Business
- Next generation diagnostics and troubleshooting
“This release of SteelCentral delivers significant enhancements in cloud-based performance monitoring, along with new capabilities that will help accelerate business execution and boost productivity,” said Taj ElKhayat, Regional Vice President, Middle East and Africa at Riverbed Technology. “As more enterprises embrace digital and cloud services, SteelCentral provides the high definition visibility that is critical to enabling and assuring the success of these transformational initiatives. SteelCentral is the only performance management solution that can deliver comprehensive insight into end user experience, application, network, and infrastructure performance in a unified, central view. It truly is the command centre for application performance for the digital enterprise.”
Extended visibility into the cloud, PaaS and containers
With this release, IT can automatically scale monitoring across applications that leverage technologies like PaaS, containers and micro-services. IT operations and development teams can visualise applications’ behaviour in real-time to troubleshoot existing issues or to proactively improve performance. Additionally, this release of SteelCentral AppInternals introduces out-of-the-box monitoring for applications deployed on Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, and will also be conveniently offered on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace for AWS customers.
Further, SteelCentral vastly improves the ability to monitor applications deployed on PaaS and containerised environments. As these environments dynamically scale during peak and off-peak periods, conventional performance monitoring tools that trace interactions between servers cannot coherently represent application behaviour. This release introduces the Application Performance Graph that visually maps interactions between application modules in real-time, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. This reveals dependencies and hotspots obscured by the elasticity of the environment so that IT can observe and fix issues with the most overarching business impact.
Large-scale virtualised network performance monitoring
Riverbed improves the ability of companies to monitor virtualised server traffic with this release. By redesigning how packet capture data is incorporated, SteelCentral has enhanced productivity associated with monitoring and troubleshooting high-performance virtualised networks.
Expanded unified communications monitoring
SteelCentral monitors performance across multiple UC solutions – including Microsoft Skype for Business in conjunction with Cisco and Avaya UC traffic – with a multi-vendor, multi-tenant dashboard that provides an at-a-glance view of overall UC performance. In addition, global UC performance analysis is now blended with performance analysis from networks, other applications and infrastructure in the SteelCentral Portal, providing IT teams with unified and holistic view of performance.
Next-generation diagnostics and troubleshooting
Riverbed has drastically improved the ability for IT managers to troubleshoot network and application issues with this new extension.
SteelCentral has modernised the interface of SteelCentral NetProfiler to improve usability and performance. The Preferred Interfaces screen and Network Hotspots dashboard shows top utilised interfaces as well as interfaces with the worst user response times. As a result, network managers are able to quickly recognise areas that require additional attention to improve network performance overall and proactively make adjustments.
Riverbed SteelCentral features advancements in several key platform components, including SteelCentral AppInternals, SteelCentral NetProfiler, SteelCentral Portal, and SteelCentral UCExpert.
