Observability matters, clearly. With a global estate of web-driven cloud-powered IT resources to orchestrate across increasingly virtualized and abstracted layers of compute, analytics, storage and network connectivity, we need sophisticated ways and means to “observe” the resources within.
At a time now when vendors in this space are keen to shrug off the Application Performance Management (APM) labels that may have categorized them in the past, the race to coin key corporate taglines that lay claim to competency in a new era of AI observability are teeming and plenteous.
Among those firms aiming to take a slice of this pie is Riverbed, a company that insists it can help organizations optimize their users’ experiences with AI automation for the prevention, identification and resolution of IT issues.
Unified Observability, Unified Agent
Among the Riverbed platform updates this year are new tools and a unified agent built on the company’s open architecture. Keen to emphasize its platform’s full-fidelity information and application services observability capabilities (a fancy way of saying all data) Riverbed’s new observability capabilities are designed to overcome visibility blind spots around public cloud, Zero Trust and SD-WAN architectures, plus remote work environments also.
The Riverbed Unified Agent streamlines the deployment and management of visibility solutions with one single agent and allows IT to add SaaS-delivered visibility modules.
Oh No, Not Again: Alert Fatigue
Riverbed IQ 2.0 is an AIOps service that claims to reduce alert fatigue and enables IT to identify and solve issues faster by using AI-driven correlation and automation of Riverbed and third-party data.
“Great AI starts with great data, and our platform and visibility solutions provide IT with full-fidelity [insight] and real data that is the most comprehensive in the industry, along with an AIOps engine that uses AI automation to remediate issues faster, often without human intervention. At our core, Riverbed is focused on helping organizations improve their users’ digital experiences by using AI automation for the prevention, identification, and resolution of IT issues,” said Dave Donatelli, chief executive officer at Riverbed.
The Riverbed Platform collects full-fidelity data spanning networks, IT infrastructure, applications, user experience, endpoints and cloud. As an open platform, it launches with approximately 35 pre-built application and software integrations. It applies the data collated, collected and ingested – including information streams from third parties – into an AIOps engine for analysis and correlation. This is the point where root cause identification is determined and automated remediations are launched. Reporting occurs using Riverbed dashboards, or through integration with IT Services Management tools such as ServiceNow.
Perilous Complex IT Estates
IT teams are already struggling to manage sprawling estates riddled with blind spots, information overload from excessive IT alerts, talent shortages and tighter budgets.
Introducing more technology without the right foundations can lead to poor ROI.
Now, as IT environments have evolved, new blind spots have emerged, thanks to remote work environments, zero-trust networks, SD-WAN architectures and public clouds – creating even more pressure.
“Arguably the most famous technology glitch in the world is the one in The Matrix movie, which is an occurrence that can’t be logically explained. For many IT teams, this feels like the reality and we’re unlikely to ever hear the full story of the causes as disparate IT systems and a lack of centralized monitoring make it difficult to identify common threads across outages. But, with the right tools in place, glitches in any ‘matrix’ can be confined to fiction and business downtime and impact can be greatly minimized,” said John Atkinson, director of solutions engineering UK&I, Riverbed Technology.
Magical analyst house Gartner tells us that over one-third (38%) of managers feel overwhelmed by this mounting burden of information – showing it’s not unusual for digital infrastructures to become so overloaded with data that operational efficiency and clarity suffer. According to an IDC survey, 56% of firms report using 10 or more monitoring and observability tools and this tool sprawl creates data silos and complexity that hinder IT teams’ efficiency.
Holistic Happiness
“Before IT issues become major news headlines, companies should take preventative measures by gaining full visibility of ever-sprawling IT estates. Possessing a holistic view of IT infrastructure enables businesses to see and rectify potential issues, while developing a recovery plan can also minimize disruptions to core operations and customer service,” added Riverbed’s Atkinson.
Looking ahead at what our understanding of unified observability should be in cloud-native greenfield (and indeed brownfield or bluefield) environments and taking Riverbed’s platform progression in mind… we need to think about this function as a capability to connect all data points across an organization into a single view. That first part should perhaps be obvious.
A more extended notion of how observability should now work across complex cloud and data estates also encompasses platform capabilities to standardize alerts and notifications to simplify analysis and prioritization. All of this should help prevent downtime and improve business agility and resilience.
