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Blog • • 4 minute read

Riverbed Improves Unified Observability and Reduces Agent Sprawl

The challenge of disjointed tool sets burdening both IT administration and end-user experience are being addressed by Riverbed through the unveiling of their Riverbed Platform and Riverbed Unified Agents. Riverbed aims to transform IT landscapes by enabling organizations to navigate complexity with ease and elevate both operational effectiveness and end-user experiences to unprecedented levels.

In this blog

  1. Riverbed Platform
  2. Riverbed Unified Agent
  3. Aternity Mobile

Many organizations struggle with disparate bespoke toolsets deployed across their endpoints to provide necessary management, security and observability capabilities. This creates challenges on two fronts: the IT administration side and the end-user endpoint side. While these capabilities are essential, they typically lack integration, increasing the complexity and burden on IT.

On the administration side, each tool has its own management interface, data warehouse, analysis processes, and provides recommendations and actions based on siloed data. For each solution, administrators must log in to individual consoles, respond to alerts, analyze findings, and take action. This distributed approach, spanning network, endpoints, cloud, mobile, and more, stretches IT teams thin and creates data silos that are challenging to correlate. Instead of streamlining operations, these tools often impede IT efficiency.

On the endpoint side, every tool requires its own agent, adding load to the system. This often necessitates faster and more expensive hardware primarily due to management overhead rather than the actual end-user workload. Despite improved hardware, many end-users find that these tools have a daily impact on their experience and productivity. Consequently, support costs rise while productivity declines. As a result, most organizations will not or even cannot implement a new tool or capability unless it is able to replace one or more existing endpoint agents.

Riverbed is addressing both challenges with the launch of their new Riverbed Platform and Riverbed Unified Agent.

 Riverbed Platform

The improved Riverbed Platform addresses the need for observability in modern IT operations by harnessing high-fidelity data collection, AI, and automation. It empowers IT teams to efficiently manage increasing workloads while minimizing troubleshooting time and costs. The Riverbed Platform integrates data from various IT sources including datacenters, public clouds, and endpoints.  Additionally, Riverbed's Platform supports a range of pre-built remediations, automations, and application integrations, simplifying integration with third-party software and allowing for customization to suit specific use cases.

The Riverbed Platform unifies the data observability across the technology stacks in an environment including:

  • Applications
  • Network packets and flows
  • Datacenter infrastructure
  • Cloud
  • User endpoints and experience

At the core of the Riverbed Platform lies Riverbed IQ, which uses AI for baselining, pattern detection, and correlation to rapidly identify, diagnose and take action on challenges before they can cause problems.  A significant benefit of Riverbed IQ is the reduction in noise from events which alleviates alert fatigue and enhances IT's reaction. To enable proactive action on the data, Riverbed IQ has low code/no-code automation capabilities that can be intelligently acted upon. 

 Riverbed Unified Agent

Riverbed Unified Agent will reduce the agent sprawl on the endpoints by both consolidating the agents for Riverbed modules, but also by providing a platform for select 3rd party tools to be integrated as well.  This Unified Agent will improve by:

  • Require less overhead on endpoints as they share common elements
  • Overall reduce number of agents on an endpoint, improving performance
  • Simplify agent updates as only 1 agent will need to be updated on an endpoint
  • Fewer software agent results in less complexity when troubleshooting misconfigurations
  • More secure as there is less software on the machine to patch

At launch the Riverbed Unified Agent will support Aternity End-User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) and Digital Assistant with more modules being added rapidly. 

 Aternity Mobile

Finally Riverbed is further extending the capabilities the Riverbed Platform to corporate owned mobile devices.  Aternity is the digital employee monitoring (DEM) capability of the Riverbed Platform and now with mobile will give a unified view of the employee experience across all devices – laptops, PCs, virtual and mobile. Aternity now supports Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and Chromebook. Aternity Mobile will gather more than 150 metrics on device, application, and network performance.  Some of the metrics Aternity Mobile will gather from devices include:

  • Battery health
  • App launches, usage, and crashes
  • Application network traffic and domains accessed

Aternity is positioning itself as a leader in the digital employee experience (DEX) market by providing a unified view of actual employee experience, for every enterprise app running on any type of device, no matter where they work, and enabling the organization to keep employees productive and engaged.

Technologies