Riverbed announced the latest release of Riverbed SteelCentral that redefines the application performance management (APM) market with a unified APM and end-user experience monitoring solution.

This unique approach enables organizations to monitor the digital experience for all applications, and capture every application transaction at a level of depth and quality that is essential for today’s digital business.

With this SteelCentral release, Riverbed is also introducing powerful AI-based business analytics that provide meaningful insights for the business, as well as new integration between SteelCentral and Riverbed Xirrus Wi-Fi access points.

Riverbed SteelCentral is an end-to-end solution that blends device-based end user experience, infrastructure, application, and network monitoring to enable customers to holistically manage the users’ digital experience.

“Companies in virtually every industry are pursuing digital business initiatives to deliver a better end user experience – these are highly strategic investments designed to drive significant improvements in employee productivity, customer loyalty, and financial performance. But as organizations roll these digital initiatives out, they’re discovering that they’re blind – their highly fragmented traditional APM tools are unable to help them accurately measure the end user experience and identify the underlying drivers of that experience,” said Mike Sargent, SVP, GM for SteelCentral at Riverbed. “With today’s SteelCentral release, we are reinventing APM – it’s the only user experience centric solution that captures all data for every application and transaction. SteelCentral continues to lead the industry in delivering the most comprehensive, integrated and unified solution for monitoring and managing the entire digital experience of the enterprise’s most precious asset: the end user.”

This SteelCentral release is well aligned to address emerging enterprise needs and in a recent Riverbed survey of business decision makers, nearly all respondents agreed (99%) that visibility across a customer’s digital experience is critical to their business. In addition, 77% said it was critical to invest in improving the digital experience for users or customers in the next 12-months.

“As companies transform their business, there is a critical need for them to understand the impact of their digital initiatives: both in terms of the customers’ experience and the interaction between application components and that experience. When there is ineffective digital experience management, this leads to business disruption in the form of risk to the reputation of the company and management, a decrease in revenue growth, lack of scale or lack of customer insight,” said Stephen Elliot, Program Vice President, Management Software and DevOps, at IDC. “When the focus is on the end user customer, the business wins.”

Unified APM and End User Experience Monitoring Solution

With this release, SteelCentral delivers an unified APM and End User Experience Monitoring solution that supports a true enterprise view. SteelCentral enables enterprises to monitor the digital experience of every user, every app in the portfolio, troubleshoot every transaction executed and analyze the business impact of poor performance to isolate and resolve problems faster while optimizing app and digital performance. It is critical that companies have digital experience management capabilities in place so that they can truly measure the digital experience.

The unified solution introduces a single license for end user devices and applications, and is a SaaS offering. This dramatically simplifies procurement, deployment and data collection by enabling companies to quickly and flexibly deploy across applications and end user devices to monitor potential changes in performance for critical transformation initiatives like cloud migration, data center consolidation or office expansion. It is available from Riverbed, the Riverbed partner community and the ServiceNow Store.

Unparalleled Scale for Digital Business

SteelCentral has also significantly enhanced its industry leading scalability with a new management clustered architecture that enables companies to keep pace with the challenges of managing modern application architectures. Other APM vendors make a trade-off between data quality and scale – sampling transactions and sacrificing metadata or depth in the call stack in order to support large environments. This leaves significant user experience and application performance blind spots, making it impossible to manage and optimize every user’s experience and deliver customer intimacy. SteelCentral’s auto-tuning and data compression mechanisms, along with our new clustered architecture, help to solve this big-data problem. A single analysis server can now support tens of thousands of agents, enabling our customers to monitor and manage billions of transactions per day.

AI-Powered Big Data Business Analytics

SteelCentral is also introducing AI-based visualizations that put the data richness to work for the business. Traditional APM tools were not built to cope with the massive data volume, high transaction velocity and highly varied data that are generated by today’s digital business. With this release, Riverbed leverages its "big transaction data" alongside state-of-the-art data science concepts that enhances the ability for users to diagnose transaction trends over time. This release introduces an innovative “Prism” report which looks longitudinally at the conversion funnel for a business transaction flow. This view allows users to visually examine trends over time, spot issues and then proactively resolve related problems.

Integration with Riverbed Xirrus Wi-Fi

Finally, this release enables customers deploying Riverbed Xirrus Wi-Fi solutions to ensure they deliver an excellent digital experience to their end users leveraging these wireless access points. A bi-directional integration between Xirrus Wi-Fi and SteelCentral enables IT to rapidly identify and resolve end user issues caused by poor signal strength or device performance.