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Solution Brief

Network & Infrastructure Management (NIM) with Riverbed SteelCentral Companies leverage far too many tools to manage the performance of their networks and infrastructure. The result of a highly fragmented approach to this function is a large number of blind spots and difficulty diagnosing the root cause of performance problems. Riverbed SteelCentral helps companies effectively manage network and infrastructure management, improving the ability to manage performance proactively and improve end-­user satisfaction.

It is clear that companies still have a long way to go when managing their network, infrastructure and application performance. Even after years of acquiring tools to manage the network and infrastructure, 40% of all network problems are experienced and reported by end-­users before network operations is aware.1 The typical network team spends 70% of their time fixing

1 EMA Network Megatrends, 2016 2 http://www-­nexthink.s3.amazonaws.com/brochures/doc/Forrester_Nexthink_TAP.pdf

problems;;1 90% of IT executives say that end-­users struggle with business technology problems that the company has no way to detect;;2 and 54% if IT application managers say that troubleshooting app performance problems takes too long.3

The bottom line is that applications are complex with a multitude of issues that cause failure. When you think about the variety of reasons that an application is slow or “fails,” the root causes can vary widely. The issue might be caused by device problems, OS failures, configuration issues in the WAN and LAN, network congestion problems, or missing or broken links–and that just names a few.

So, if we have been leveraging tools to manage performance, why are there still issues? In fact, both the way that we have acquired tools and the way that we manage performance is at the root of this problem. Each organizational group has historically been responsible for their performance domain with application teams managing app information, network teams managing network information, infrastructure teams managing infrastructure information and so on. Each team had its own preferred set of tools and these tools didn’t talk to each other well. As a result, there is a

3 EMA, “Application Performance Management in the Age of Hybrid Cloud,” December 2013

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multitude of overlapping fragmented tools. Looking at network and infrastructure management alone, the typical enterprise has between 4 and 15 network management tools1 and the typical enterprise has more than 5 IT infrastructure management tools.4

At the same time, these tools are not coordinated and thus leave blind spots. There are a lot of areas where IT teams just cannot see. Communication between teams is poor and troubleshooting takes too long. This fragmentation and the resulting blind spots are a serious issue for network and infrastructure management. In the 2016 EMA megatrends report, when asked what the primary root cause/s of the last three difficult performance/degradation issues, configuration problems were identified 38% of the time, network performance/congestion was identified 38% and server problems was identified 27%.1

The impact of these blind spots produces several areas of pain for IT and the business. Troubleshooting, in particular becomes highly reactive. It takes too long to investigate the source of performance issues. Various team gather in war rooms and point fingers at one another – the network team blames the server team, who blames the app team, who blames the network team, etc… It takes far too long to solve the problem.

But the problems do not end with troubleshooting. In fact, some of the more insidious issues stem from the ongoing reactive nature of this paradigm. Underperformance impacts your ability to provide high service levels, end-­user satisfaction with IT services, your cost for providing these services, and your ability to deliver strategic initiatives to impact the business.

At the executive level, these issues hamper your ability to effectively meet the needs of the business. With large blocks of time allocated to resolving performance issues, IT drags high costs, is inflexible and reactive, and long resolution times damage company reputation and brand.

4 Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools,” Gartner, 09 May

At the infrastructure level, making the connection between the infrastructure and both the network and applications is challenging. With poor understanding of the infrastructure itself, it is difficult to differentiate between real issues and false positives. In addition, troubleshooting time is elongated as underlying problems are difficulty to spot.

Similarly, with network operations, blind spots make problems diagnosis challenging. Multiple, redundant tools help with some issues but make diagnosis more challenging and complicated. Meanwhile, network teams face higher and stricter demands for service levels, and are often scapegoated for service outages.

Meeting NIM challenges with SteelCentral SteelCentral is your “performance command center.” It’s the only solution that provides integrated digital experience management – deep visibility and performance on a truly end-­to-­end basis, from the end user’s device, across applications, networks, and into the infrastructure on which those business-­critical applications run. Integrated visibility from the end user’s device across the application delivery infrastructure is the only way to assure a reliable, high-­quality user experience.

Within the SteelCentral portfolio, the Network and Infrastructure Performance Management solution ensures the reliability of the networks and infrastructure that underpin your business-­critical enterprise apps. The SteelCentral Integrated Network and Infrastructure Management solution offers broad monitoring and analytics for network traffic and infrastructure elements…all in the context of the end-­user application experience. Only SteelCentral monitors and provides insights into network performance, congestion, configuration, and infrastructure elements.

2016, ID: G00296324.

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It offers deep visibility and analytics at both the network level and the infrastructure level. SteelCentral enables you to quickly identify and troubleshoot performance issues, regardless of whether the source is a network issue, a configuration problem or even an infrastructure element. Unlike other solutions that have strengths in specific areas, SteelCentral Network and Infrastructure Management blends information across network, infrastructure and UC domains and enable companies with the ability to proactively manage performance as well as quickly resolve issues.

At the top level, it is important to remember that SteelCentral leverages a unique approach which blends data from a wide variety of performance domains. This means, that by combining information and analytics, companies reduce the number of blind spots, improve their ability to manage performance proactively, and are able to move from a reactive mode of performance management to a proactive one. SteelCentral blends data from all relevant sources into a single, actionable source of truth for stakeholders. It blends data across performance domains – application, end-­user, network, and infrastructure – to create a dynamic map of application performance. It can be tailored to different teams – IT, LoB, or executive – so each can get a complete picture of the application environment and drill down for further detail as required. Instead of wasting valuable time and resources assessing blame, you can rapidly diagnose and fix service issues before end users notice.

Use Case: Network performance monitoring The SteelCentral network performance management solution alerts you to network issues before business is impacted, helps you understand dependencies between your applications and your network, and accelerates troubleshooting. With this integrated approach you can understand the critical impact the network has on application performance.

SteelCentral NPM monitors network health from multiple, simultaneous viewpoint and utilizes multiple data collection methods including flow, packet, end-­user experience monitoring, and transaction analysis. Using this integrated data, you can graphically monitor the end-­to-­end health of applications from the network viewpoint. SteelCentral also monitor complete network health with at-­a-­glance views that highlight when and where issues are occurring and provides early warning of issues, often before users even notice. These notifications baseline performance and alert on changes from normal.

Troubleshooting an alert is fast and easy, simply drill down from the alert to the answer with just a few keystrokes, even into the packet details. It typically only takes minutes to resolve performance problems. This is because we offer fine-­grained packet resolution with large-­scale packet storage and fast indexing so that all data is available when needed.

In addition, SteelCentral has some of the richest network and application analysis and workflows, not only providing pre-­defined insights right out of the box, but also offering the analysis capability to start anywhere, go anywhere, and report on everything. Lastly, SteelCentral can trace an individual transaction throughout its journey and through visualization and analysis techniques automatically diagnose bottlenecks and pinpoint sources of delay, which is a very powerful diagnostic aid for your toolbox.

Use Case: Infrastructure monitoring SteelCentral IT Infrastructure Management is a holistic solution for mapping, monitoring and troubleshooting

Allianz Turkey

Allianz Turkey, 31st largest company in the world, wanted to

significantly improve the way the network and its insurance-­specific

applications performed. As a result of selecting Riverbed

SteelCentral, they were able to speed app performance by an

average of 44%;; increase usage by 45%;; reduce response time by

62%;; and reduce resolution times, frequently to minutes.

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your infrastructure components. It enables you to capture infrastructure topology, detect performance issues, map application network paths, diagram your network, and troubleshoot infrastructure problems. As an integrated component of the SteelCentral platform, you are able to manage infrastructure issues as an integral component of blended performance management.

With SteelCentral IT infrastructure management, you are able to automatically discover both new and changed IT infrastructure devices. With this information, you can rapidly understand the relationships and performance with data rich topology maps.

The solution also helps you quickly understand overall performance and quickly spot anomalies. Health index scores aggregate performance information to help identify poor performers providing a high-­level view of devices, types, groups, & sites. Similarly, you can aggregate performance metrics across devices, groups, and sites to better understand performance in certain areas of your organization.

Hop-­by-­hop infrastructure path views show the path an application takes as it traverses through the network. This information is critical to simplifying and streamlining both network and application troubleshooting.

Use Case: UC performance monitoring SteelCentral UC performance monitoring provides a complete solution for monitoring and troubleshooting your multi-­vendor unified communications environment. At-­a glance views of overall UC performance help you characterize the nature of a degradation, whether your problems are with Skype for Business, Cisco and Avaya endpoints or gateways. Hop-­by-­hop media path views with Intelligent Path Analysis provide graphical illustration of the media path taken for calls to more quickly isolate the source of UC-­based problems on the network or infrastructure.

Prevent end-­user outages by verifying complete end-­to-­end call routing from the end-­user perspective, ensuring all endpoints, even conference rooms, can make and

receive all the allowed calls. Test for security and compliance violations such as 900 numbers and toll fraud, and verify all aspects of voice recording – phone forwarding to VM, softkey functions, etc. Also, perform daily snapshots of your UC environment configurations with detailed inventory and exception reporting to enable auditing and compliance adherence.

Business Benefits SteelCentral network and infrastructure performance management users realize significant business benefits across all domains:

• Of SteelCentral NPM users, 81% improved mean timer to resolution (MTTR) by double or more. Nearly two-­thirds of SteelCentral NPM users improved IT efficiency (69%) and business continuity (62%), and slightly more than half of SteelCentral NPM users improve end-­user experience (51%).

• On the SteelCentral ITIM side, 94% improve MTTR by double or more and two-­thirds maintain more accurate information on network dependencies.

• Lastly, 43% of SteelCentral UC users experienced significant decrease in problems found by end users;; 42% saw a significant decrease in mean time to resolution and 30% noticed a significant decrease in outages due to configuration mistakes.

Riverside Company

Global equity firm Riverside Company was experiencing VoIP

issues along with significant user dissatisfaction. After choosing

SteelCentral UCExpert, VoIP-­related calls to the help desk are

down 35-­40%;; resolution time has decreased 75%;; and user

satisfaction is high.

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For more information Click here for more information, or here for a free trial of the Riverbed SteelCentral Network and Infrastructure Management Solutions.

About Riverbed Riverbed, at more than $1 billion in annual revenue, is the leader in application performance infrastructure, delivering the most complete platform for the hybrid enterprise to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues can be proactively detected and resolved before impacting business performance. Riverbed enables hybrid enterprises to transform application performance into a competitive advantage by maximizing employee productivity and leveraging IT to create new forms of operational agility. Riverbed’s 28,000+ customers include 97% of the Fortune 100 and 98% of the Forbes Global 100. Learn more at Riverbed.com/SteelCentral

©2017 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners. The trademarks and logos displayed herein may not be used without the prior written consent of Riverbed Technology or their respective owners.