Riverbed Technology announced the latest release of Riverbed SteelCentral, which addresses the end-to-end performance management needs of enterprises.

With this SteelCentral release, Riverbed continues to expand, integrate and simplify application performance management, providing a broad and comprehensive solution, allowing enterprises to reduce or eliminate fragmentation and dramatically simplify the process for monitoring and managing application performance.

New enhancements to SteelCentral advance the communication and interoperability of the performance monitoring modules enabling companies to better manage packet data, infrastructure, applications, and unified communications (UC).

In addition, SteelCentral is expanding its end-user experience management capabilities to better address the evolving demands that new devices, platforms, and initiatives place on modern enterprise IT.

“SteelCentral is striving to deliver the most complete, modular and integrated performance management solution in the marketplace, monitoring end-users, applications, networks and infrastructure—wherever they are, on or off the cloud. This release delivers significant advances to help enterprises holistically manage performance,” said Mike Sargent, SVP and GM of SteelCentral at Riverbed. “With this latest release, our customers are better able to proactively detect performance issues and rapidly pinpoint the root cause, regardless of whether it originates in the application, network, infrastructure or end-user device.”

Riverbed SteelCentral features advancements in several key platform components, including SteelCentral AppResponse 11, SteelCentral Packet Analyzer Plus, SteelCentral Transaction Analyzer Plus, SteelCentral UCExpert, SteelCentral NetIM and SteelCentral Aternity.

With this release, Riverbed announces the availability of SteelCentral AppResponse 11. The new solution combines the capabilities of Riverbed’s two network-based monitoring solutions — SteelCentral AppResponse and SteelCentral NetShark — providing network forensics and analytics, application analytics, and end-user experience monitoring in a single, rich and easy-to-adopt solution. It is designed to deliver value immediately out of the box for a broad set of users — network, security, app-ops and “tiger” teams — and because pre-defined insights and expert analysis are offered, the solution helps both novice and expert users. SteelCentral AppResponse 11 also significantly increases the richness of performance metrics available to users, by providing access to finer grained transaction data for which users were previously forced to access packet analysis, thus speeding analysis and decreasing mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Riverbed also introduces SteelCentral NetIM, a holistic solution for infrastructure discovery, monitoring, analysis and troubleshooting. The solution replaces SteelCentral NetCollector and NetSensor to create a single, integrated solution that enables companies to capture infrastructure information, determine state, detect performance and configuration issues, map and monitor application network paths, and troubleshoot infrastructure problems. As an integrated component of Riverbed SteelCentral, NetIM customers will manage infrastructure issues within the context of application, network and end-user experience for a truly blended view of total performance.

“SteelCentral appeals to companies struggling with too many tools supporting their IT Operations teams,” said Julie Craig, Research Director, Application Management, at Enterprise Management Associates. “With this latest release, SteelCentral offers a more unified, integrated perspective on enterprise performance, combining visibility to unified communications with infrastructure monitoring, network, end-user, and application monitoring. Riverbed continues to be uniquely positioned as an end-to-end performance monitoring vendor, with particularly strong capabilities supporting Application Performance Management (APM) and User Experience Management (UEM).”

With this release, SteelCentral UCExpert, a multi-vendor UC monitoring solution, introduces Intelligent Path Analysis Troubleshooting which enables IT staff to monitor the entire call path for a specific call and all the relevant performance metrics, including the device, network and specific settings impacting the service between the caller and receiver. Unlike competitive products that force administrators to manually correlate call and network information, this new analysis enables administrators to quickly identify network-based UC problems and dramatically reduce troubleshooting time.

With this release, SteelCentral Aternity enables IT to ensure an excellent end-user experience for the entire device estate, both Mac and Windows OS, with a consistent, unified workflow and dashboards. In addition, the release introduces unique side-by-side analytics that enable Level 3 support teams to validate the impact of strategic change initiatives, such as a Windows 10 migration, before a full enterprise rollout. As a result, these teams are able to mitigate the risk of costly application and device roll-backs while validating the impact of change on application and device health.

All updates to the Riverbed SteelCentral platform are expected to be available by December.