Riverbed unveils Unified Application Performance Management Suite

Increasingly, business performance equals application performance, with users relying on applications to reach customers, build products, automate business processes, and perform business-critical tasks. As applications have become more critical, however, they have become more complex. Riverbed Performance Management solutions address this complexity by giving IT visibility and actionable insight to deliver application performance users and the business demand.

With the introduction of OPNET AppInternals Xpert 8.5, application support, development, and QA teams have complete and coordinated visibility into application performance and, therefore, can proactively detect issues before they impact the business as well as analyse applications prior to deployment to identify bottlenecks that can impact performance in production. In addition, organisations deploying OPNET AppInternals Xpert 8.5 can take advantage of other Riverbed technologies, including Riverbed Stingray® Traffic Manager, to gain added visibility into end user experiences.

What’s New: Unique Features and Capabilities in OPNET AppInternals Xpert 8.5
Service-oriented architecture and agile development processes are not only increasing the rate at which new applications are rolled out, but also causing applications to sprawl and increase in complexity. New features in OPNET AppInternals Xpert 8.5 combine to provide application support teams and developers with the information they need to quickly identify and address complex, multi-tier application performance issues.

New Integrated Development Environment Support
OPNET AppInternals Xpert now integrates with popular integrated development environments (IDE), including Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse. This integration enables bi-directional drill down to streamline application debugging and troubleshooting, and opens up visibility and enhances collaboration across application operations and developer teams. For example, operations teams can drill down from the transaction trace to the affected code to highlight the affected calls or methods for developers. Developers and QA staff can also quickly debug new releases by understanding where code is being used and who is using it in the production environment.

Tight Integration of End-user Experience Monitoring
OPNET AppInternals Xpert 8.5 integrates real end-user experience (EUE) monitoring with transaction tracing, and application component data—adding visibility into the front-end user experience and tying it back to the exact transaction responsible for the poor experience. This integration enables application support teams to start troubleshooting with an accurate end-to-end view of application performance from the user’s perspective. As a result, these teams are aware as soon as a problem occurs and can use this end-user experience and transaction information to guide a “deep dive” into the application transaction and specific code.

End-user experience monitoring of web-based applications, including cloud-based applications, is achieved by leveraging lightweight JavaScript which can now be automatically injected via AppInternals agents or Stingray Traffic Manager, an application delivery controller that allows organisations to build custom functionality or implement traffic management policies that are unique to an application.

Transaction Trace Warehouse Enhancements
This release also enhances OPNET AppInternals Xpert’s big data approach to APM, which provides application support and developer teams with access to thousands of different types of raw data and performance metrics and the context for analysing it quickly and efficiently. OPNET AppInternals Xpert records and indexes all transaction traces—not just samples—through its Transaction Trace Warehouse (TTW). With every transaction captured, application teams always have the critical data they need at hand. A simple, powerful open-ended search speeds troubleshooting by making it fast and easy to find a single transaction among billions. A correlation engine automates troubleshooting by identifying cause-and-effect relationships across hundreds of thousands of transactions and performance metrics from across multiple application tiers. Moreover, patented analytics capabilities automatically identify unusual patterns for thousands of performance indicators to provide early warning into potential future issues.

“Whether organisations are deploying new applications, consolidating or virtualising data centers, or migrating to the cloud, managing application performance requires a holistic view that includes end-user experience monitoring, application transaction tracing and component monitoring, and underlying infrastructure and network performance management,” said Paul Brady, senior vice president and general manager of the Riverbed Performance Management Business Unit. “OPNET AppInternals Xpert provides our customers with a fast path to application problem resolution by delivering the actionable insight and data that application support and developer teams need to deliver the application and business performance.”