Riverbed Technology announced the latest enhancements to the SteelCentral platform. Riverbed SteelCentral is a comprehensive and integrated performance management solution that provides centralised visibility and insight to ensure optimal performance of enterprise applications while maximising IT efficiency and productivity. Whether the challenge is monitoring performance broadly across all applications, networks and infrastructure, or delving deep into mission critical application code, SteelCentral is the only end-to-end solution that combines user experience, application, infrastructure, and network monitoring for a holistic view of application performance.

“Today, SteelCentral knocks down all the barriers between domain siloes and makes collaborating to deliver great app performance easy - eliminating the finger-pointing, and accelerating problem resolution. This allows IT to refocus its efforts on attacking the strategic goals of the business,” said Mike Sargent, SVP, General Manager of SteelCentral at Riverbed. “Leading enterprises are adopting SteelCentral as the backbone of their app performance ‘Command Centres’ – it is clear to them that without such a powerful blended, operational view of performance, their ‘war rooms’ simply cannot achieve the level of app performance they need from today’s hybrid IT environments.”

These new enhancements to SteelCentral bring major advances in collaborative troubleshooting capabilities. While new features are being released in key components of the platform – including enhancements in Portal, AppInternals, AppResponse, NetAuditor, NetShark, NetPlanner and NetSensor – they support a common theme of improved platform integration while enhancing several powerful capabilities, including expanded network and application visibility; superior end-to-end application transaction monitoring; and more cost-effective Web application and WAN-optimisation monitoring.

Integrated Approach To Performance Management For Complex Hybrid Application Environments

Improving IT collaboration and end-to-end troubleshooting is critical in today’s application-driven business world.  For enterprises today, application performance equals business performance, and at the same time application complexity – with SaaS, cloud, hybrid networks and end-user mobility – has grown beyond the ability of the old-school, domain-centric tools to manage.

“Many enterprises don’t have the right performance management tools they need to succeed,” stated Shamus McGillicuddy, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. “The typical enterprise has between six and 10 monitoring and troubleshooting tools in active use, and with even more ‘shelf ware.’ These tools are not integrated and they typically focus on establishing the innocence of a particular technology domain. Modern IT infrastructure demands the contextual, integrated insight only delivered by cross-domain management tools.”

An “application” is not just the software code sitting on a server, but also: a very complex combination of multiple services called by the app; data which might be in multiple databases in multiple locations; physical and virtual severs hosted in on premise datacentres and in the cloud; multiple networks connecting the data and services; intricate application software architectures; and finally end-users accessing the application on many device types from many locations. In this environment, any piece of the puzzle, any flaw in the service — from server failure, to issues within

the code, to a problematic database, to network latency, to user device compatibility — can slow the application down or cause it to fail completely. Unfortunately, companies typically take a point solution approach to managing this performance with multiple, siloed tools which don’t interact with one another. This results in performance issues that are extremely difficult to resolve and a tremendous amount of IT time wasted in “war rooms.”

SteelCentral takes a new approach to application performance management. It captures and analyses performance data, deeply and broadly, across all networks and applications while monitoring end-user experience across all users, all the time.

New SteelCentral Enhancements Improve Platform Integration, Enhance Several Powerful Capabilities

• Expanded network and application visibility. These new enhancements to SteelCentral bring major advances in collaborative troubleshooting capabilities, with visibility into the actual physical application network path integrated with existing logical network and application maps. IT staff can quickly move between operational views of applications and networks, eliminating the usual finger-pointing between application and network teams, zeroing in on the problem areas due to configuration or other infrastructure changes, and enabling teams to quickly and precisely identify the root cause. Additionally, packet storage on NetShark has been expanded to 576 TB to enable deeper forensics. This is especially useful in high-volume networks, particularly those focused on security or compliance requirements like government, financial services, or healthcare organisations.
• Superior end-to-end application transaction monitoring. New enhancements deliver integration between network delay metrics and application performance metrics at the transaction level, providing complete visibility for any set of transactions in a single UI, with contextual drill down to dramatically streamline problem diagnosis and accelerate resolution of complex issues. This allows IT to refocus resources on strategic initiatives, instead of firefighting performance issues across network and application domains.
• More cost-effective Web application and WAN-optimisation monitoring. Today, hybrid IT environments have become the new norm, and companies are increasingly using Riverbed SteelHead to optimise application delivery, regardless of whether the apps are running on premise, in virtual environments, or in the cloud. Enhancements to SteelCentral bring enhanced visibility and control for SteelHead environments, enabling customers to monitor the status of SteelHead EX and SteelHead Interceptor devices as a part of their overall infrastructure. In addition, SteelCentral is delivering improved performance for end-user experience monitoring of SteelHead-optimised web and SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com. 

New SteelCentral Release Receives Customer and Partner Accolades

"As the Application Delivery Lead at GuideOne insurance we place immense value in toolsets that allow our team to focus on resolving our APM and NPM problems instead of looking for them," said Adi Radoncic, Enterprise Systems Engineer III, at GuideOne Insurance. "Riverbed SteelCentral allows us to save time and provide continuous system stability and scalability, which directly impacts our customer experience in doing business with our company. Overall, we utilise the SteelCentral platform as our navigational guide to our performance obstacles.”

“Our enterprise customers come to us for increased productivity while increasing systems performance and preventing outages and slow downs,” said Jerry Schenkelberg, Associate at Management Communication Services, Inc. “Riverbed SteelCentral provides an end-to-end solution that combines user experience, infrastructure, application, and network monitoring for a complete view of application performance. This is especially attractive to our customers as it gives them the ability to rapidly identify root causes for performance issues, reducing the need for War Rooms, allowing them to be proactive about managing performance and for faster reporting across the enterprise.”

These enhancements to the Riverbed SteelCentral platform are expected to be available in November 2015.

SteelCentral and the Riverbed Application Performance Platform^T

SteelCentral is the Command Center of Riverbed’s Application Performance Platform, a complete platform that gives CIOs end-to-end application visibility, optimisation and control, across the entire enterprise. Riverbed SteelCentral has been recognised as a “Leader” in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) for two consecutive years and “Visionary” in the Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (2014). In addition, Riverbed SteelHead has been recognised as a “Leader” in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimisation” eight years running.

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