Riverbed launches SteelCentral Portal

Riverbed Technology has launched Riverbed SteelCentral Portal, a breakthrough software solution for managing application performance in today’s hybrid IT environments. For the first time, companies are able to blend performance information from network, end user experience, and application domains into a simple source of truth for end-to-end application visibility, eliminating the finger pointing that occurs among siloed teams who have a limited view into only their domain expertise.

Effectively managing application performance in today’s hybrid enterprise requires deep and broad visibility across complex networks and hosting environments. Only SteelCentral Portal provides the most comprehensive, end-to-end visibility, fundamentally changing the way teams work together to resolve application performance issues and ultimately improve business performance. SteelCentral Portal gives each stakeholder a customisable graphical dashboard with the most complete and relevant information. For each role, SteelCentral Portal provides all the needed information in a single screen, with the ability to drill down into specific performance information.

For example, a cross-domain team can view common information about the performance of an application, the network, and how the end user is being affected through the Portal’s “High-Level Summary” view. Looking at the “Application Map” in this view, the application team can quickly identify the application is the root cause and then drill down further to establish why, identifying issues such as newly installed application code.

With SteelCentral Portal, Riverbed blends performance data from its industry-leading SteelCentral visibility and SteelHead optimization and control solutions. This holistic view gives customers a single source of truth for application performance by accelerating, troubleshooting, optimising application data and traffic across the entire hybrid network, and even preventing outages in the future. SteelCentral Portal gives different domain teams a more holistic picture across the entire hybrid enterprise to identify potential problems more readily and keep people focused on strategic projects of business value rather than non-productive operational firefighting.

“The world has shifted – for today’s enterprise, it’s all about the app. Our customers need rich, horizontal visibility to break down common siloes and see every aspect of application performance across today’s hybrid enterprises,” said Mike Sargent, senior vice president and general manager of SteelCentral at Riverbed. “With the launch of Riverbed’s groundbreaking new visibility solution, SteelCentral Portal, enterprise teams now have a robust, shared, easy-to-use view of end-to-end application performance. No competitor can match SteelCentral Portal’s unique combination of end-user experience monitoring, network performance management (NPM), and application performance management (APM) capabilities. With this unparalleled level of both broad and deep visibility, IT teams can more quickly identify root causes of performance issues and drill down to fix them fast.”

Application Performance in Complex, Hybrid Environments Is a Growing Challenge
Application performance equals business performance and, as a result, visibility into application performance is critical for organization’s today. But visibility is increasingly difficult to achieve with today’s complex hybrid IT environments and applications, which often span traditional data centers, third-party hosting facilities, branch offices, mobile devices, and SaaS and IaaS-based clouds. At the same time, delivering applications is also becoming more complex as networks evolve to a hybrid model combining private and public links.

Today, most IT organisations address performance issues in a “war room” where cross-domain teams come together to tackle performance issues. The trouble is that each of these domains – network performance, app performance, end-user experience – typically has its own set of performance management tools. Multiple tools from different vendors provide fragmentary and incomplete visibility, leaving IT stuck in siloes – each domain with a different perspective of the performance issue. IT engineers spend a lot of time analysing data and performance metrics but arrive at different and often conflicting conclusions on the cause of performance problems. The result is that valuable time is wasted pointing fingers and resources are drained from strategic initiatives. This lack of true visibility has real consequences for application performance and ultimately for business performance.

SteelCentral Portal brings a new approach to problem-solving with a holistic operational view of the complete IT environment. SteelCentral Portal uniquely blends data from all relevant sources into a single, actionable source of truth for stakeholders, with easy to view graphical interfaces and application maps. These sources include Riverbed’s industry-leading visibility tools and solutions: SteelCentral AppInternals and AppResponse for application performance management data, and NetProfiler and NetSensor for network performance management data.

“The new SteelCentral Portal simplifies the complexity of getting a complete, end-to-end view of our IT infrastructure so that we can analyse, troubleshoot, and report network and application issues to avoid negatively impacting the end user and our business,” said Michelle Jackman, Application Performance Management Lead at Devon Energy. “The interface is easy to navigate and now, with the ability to generate application maps, we quickly get the big-picture information we need to diagnose issues without jumping around to different tools and views.”

“An end-to-end view of performance and performance management has always been important for delivering optimal and consistent end-user experience, but it becomes critical as customers embrace hybrid architectures, SaaS applications, and enterprise mobility solutions,” said Gary Middleton, Global Business Development Manager at Dimension Data. “The SteelCentral Portal provides our customers with true end-to-end end visibility into application performance, network performance, and the end user which is very compelling. In addition, it enables all IT teams, whether focused on the network or applications, to get information faster and easier.”

"Applications play a prominent role in the success of most enterprises. In a very real sense, applications are their business,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, senior analyst, Network Management, Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. "SteelCentral solutions play a fundamental role in helping IT organizations maintain and optimize the performance of their applications and network, and with SteelCentral Portal they are able to more easily collaborate and resolve performance issues from the ’top-down.’"

SteelCentral Portal features:
· Graphical application discovery: SteelCentral Portal takes an interactive, wizard-driven process to help IT teams discover and rapidly generate a dynamic service map. This reduces the time and effort needed to develop and implement a reporting framework and enables companies to quickly diagnose and remedy performance issues.
· Data driven metric guidance: SteelCentral Portal includes powerful, out of the box workflows that assist administrators to select the “best” metrics based on available data.
Administrators determine the information needed and SteelCentral Portal automatically curates different workflows based on available data sources.
· Efficient management reporting: SteelCentral Portal gives a central source of truth for application performance and supporting infrastructure. Looking at the same triage data fosters better teamwork helping teams rapidly diagnose the issue’s root cause. And non-technical stakeholders across the enterprise get the meaningful data that they want.
· Relevant stakeholder views: SteelCentral Portal offers each stakeholder a role-based home page with custom and default dashboards tailored to the individual’s needs and information prioritized for that user and role.
· Monitor optimized and non-optimized traffic with SteelHead integration: With SteelHead appliances integrated with AppResponse or NetProfiler, IT teams can look across their network and view both non-optimized and optimized traffic. Regardless of whether the data resides in the data center, branch, or in the cloud, SteelCentral Portal users can drill down to understand which applications are optimized, how they’re running, and what users are doing with each of them.