Today Riverbed announced the latest version of its digital experience management (DEM) platform, SteelCentral. The latest version is all about helping to ensure that organizations digital services have the performance they need while optimizing the experience of users. Regardless of where the components of the service reside (on-premise, in the cloud or a hybrid of both), the latest version of SteelCentral will enhance customers’ ability to manage and troubleshoot the entire digital experience chain.
Today Riverbed announced the latest version of its digital experience management (DEM) platform, SteelCentral. The latest version is all about helping to ensure that organizations digital services have the performance they need while optimizing the experience of users. Regardless of where the components of the service reside (on-premise, in the cloud or a hybrid of both), the latest version of SteelCentral will enhance customers’ ability to manage and troubleshoot the entire digital experience chain.
One of the core capabilities of the new SteelCentral is the ability to deliver seamless monitoring workflow between end user experience and network performance. This seamless workflow enables users to troubleshoot performance issues by analyzing device, application, network or infrastructure health traffic, something that Riverbed states is a capability unique to this solution. On top of this, the company states that SteelCentral Aternity also introduces a new integration with ServiceNow, a leader in IT Service Management, to create a closed loop troubleshooting-ticketing solution that automatically generates tickets if certain performance thresholds are exceeded, and provides tier one support professionals with rich performance information to vastly improve first call resolution.
Containers have made a big splash in the industry over the past year or so. Noting this, as well as the shift in DevOps as to how they approach application development, SteelCentral now allows container monitoring with the ability to manage the container and application performance without requiring modifications of the container image itself. This gives companies the freedom to use a broad array of containerized applications while at the same time allowing DevOps to keep working in the way they are comfortable with. Riverbed states that this new feature will work with container orchestrators like Kubernetes or Swarm.
Another new ability announced today is the ability to “stitch” application log messages into application performance data to a full end-to-end transaction record for every transaction. According to the company, this ability can simplify the effort in troubleshooting performance issues and application errors. This new ability could potentially shave hours off of troubleshooting by allowing application developers/support to for a log message and locate every application activity that generated the log message versus using a silo log analytics solution. This ability points exactly to where in the call-stack a message was generate.
Big Data is potentially a big disruptor. But there are several potential roadblocks along the way of gaining insights of this data. One potential roadblock is networking. As part of its new monitoring abilities, the new SteelCentral release vastly increases the ability for companies to manage network performance in large scale, large volume environments by vastly improving the ability to capture network information and improving the resiliency of this process. Part of this ability to capture greater network performance is the introduction of 40GbE NIC in Riverbed appliances. In further effort to tackle network performance, Riverbed doubled the flow capacity to 20 million deduplicated or 200 million raw flows per minute. One other networking improvement with SteelCentral, is the capability to centrally manage large-scale NPM environments making global changes as required.
Riverbed also introduced a new a flexible, modular service offering to help companies leverage Riverbed’s domain expertise and accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, Performance Command Center (PCC). PCC covers all of SteelCentral’s performance domains: End User, Network, Application and Infrastructure. PCC allows deployment on premise, or in Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Or the service can be transferred to the customer or partner, managed by Riverbed, or managed as a service.
New capabilities include:
- Creating a seamless link between end user experience and network performance management
- Accelerating the DevOps application lifecycle with improved container monitoring and enriched application performance troubleshooting
- Adapting to the Big Data requirements brought on by digital transformation
- Accelerating the transition to DEM with new, flexible cloud-based services
Availability
The new version of SteelCentral is available now.
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