Riverbed Technology, the leader in application performance infrastructure, today announced the launch of Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals 10, a breakthrough application performance management (APM) solution that helps IT teams take control of application performance in their evolving hybrid IT environments. Setting a new standard in simplicity and ease-of-use, SteelCentral AppInternals 10 has been re-designed from the ground up. It can be set up in minutes and its modern, web-based, interactive dashboard can be accessed on computers, tablets, and smartphones – no special skills are required to set up and operate.

SteelCentral AppInternals 10 monitors applications on and off the cloud to provide end-to-end performance visibility and powerful analytics that help IT improve application performance, user experience, and business impact. Unlike other APM solutions that often sample transactions and aggregate metrics into intervals of one minute or more, SteelCentral AppInternals 10 traces every transaction from end-user device or browser to the application backend, while capturing second-by-second system metrics in production environments. These capabilities provide the most accurate perspectives into the end user experience, user demographics, and application performance, along with convenient workflows for root cause analysis. Further, IT can proactively improve performance by analysing billions of metrics using simple queries to discover bugs and deliver business insights.

Hybrid IT architectures bring significant benefits to organisations—agility/time to market, cost savings, flexibility. These benefits are fuelling the hybrid revolution. In fact, according to Gartner, “75% of enterprises expecting to have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of this year.” But, along with the benefits, hybrid IT also brings challenges, including less visibility, less control, and greater need for optimising app performance over long distances. Effectively managing application performance in these evolving hybrid environments requires broad and deep visibility across application hosting architectures, complex networks, and end-user experiences. The complexity of multiple applications, clouds, networks, service providers, and end users everywhere all combine to hinder the application and network visibility needed to ensure optimal performance and a consistently great experience for end users, independent of their location or device. Such a consistent end-user experience is essential for everyone to work effectively and for the enterprise to perform at its peak.

SteelCentral AppInternals solves these visibility and control challenges to facilitate superior application performance across the hybrid enterprise. It monitors and stores a record of every end-to-end transaction along with its associated system metrics and call trees including parameters, URLs, user information, and remote calls. This ‘big data’ based approach allows IT to quickly and easily reconstruct incidents in great detail, measure impact, and identify and eliminate root causes before users notice. IT is rarely more than two clicks away from an answer when performance issues begin to appear.

Unlike other APM tools, SteelCentral AppInternals does not limit IT to pre-set workflows that encourage fixing problems after major slowdowns or outages. With SteelCentral AppInternals 10, IT can discover anomalies, measure business impact, plan for capacity, and continuously improve performance. On demand analytics, using simple “and”/“or” queries promotes proactive performance improvement and avoids reactive firefighting.

With this release, Riverbed is combining the industry’s most comprehensive application performance solution with the industry’s only single source of truth for network, application and end-user experience performance monitoring. SteelCentral AppInternals 10 integrates with Riverbed SteelCentral Portal, which provides end-to-end performance visibility and analytics across end-users, applications, networks, and infrastructure. This combination provides the complete picture that other point APM solutions cannot deliver, and changes the way IT domain teams work together to resolve performance issues.

“With the launch of the completely redesigned SteelCentral AppInternals 10, along with the recent release of the all new SteelCentral Portal, we are delivering  the richest, most comprehensive visibility and diagnostic capabilities to manage application performance across today’s hybrid enterprise,” said Mike Sargent, senior vice president and general manager of SteelCentral at Riverbed. “We’re also breaking the ease-of-use barrier—eliminating the need for a Ph.D. in APM to diagnose issues that quickly impact the business. AppInternals’ combination of comprehensive analytics and ease-of-use is unmatched by any other vendor. Furthermore, through the integration between AppInternals and SteelCentral Portal, we are extending visibility beyond the app into the network to deliver a complete picture of performance. This will fundamentally change the way teams collaborate to address performance issues going forward.”

"With applications as the foundation of business, organisations need comprehensive APM solutions that accurately expose and diagnose problems quickly without raising false alarms,” says Julie Craig, Research Director- Application Management at Enterprise Management Associates. "APM allows IT to navigate the inner workings of complex application stacks so that application performance issues do not translate into business performance issues.”