Riverbed Launches AI Observability Platform To Plug ‘Blind Spots’ From Zero Trust, Mobility

Riverbed’s CEO Dave Donatelli tells CRN that the new platform, coupled with its features and latest version of its AI service, presents a “whole new way of doing things” for the market.

Riverbed has launched what the company is calling its biggest release in years: an open, AI-powered observability platform aimed at filling in the blind spots that exist in complex IT environments that include public cloud and remote work environments, as well as zero Trust and SD-WAN architectures.

The San Francisco-based company in combination with the platform is also launching the second generation of Riverbed IQ 2.0, an AIOps service that gives IT teams a chance to solve issues faster and without human intervention by cutting down the vast number of alerts and injecting more automation into the process, Riverbed said on Tuesday.

Riverbed’s CEO Dave Donatelli told CRN that the new platform, coupled with its features and AI service, presents a “whole new way of doing things” for the market.

“We’re the only company that can tie together endpoint and network and applications and give a broader view of what an enterprise is doing, and then use AI to automate prevention, the detection and the resolution of problems in that chain in a customer’s environment,” he said.

[Related: Riverbed Launches MSP Program As Company Revamps Overall Channel Approach]

The new AI-powered platform, which is available immediately through channel partners, works by collecting full-fidelity data across a customer’s entire IT stack, including from networks, IT infrastructure, applications, user experience, endpoints, and the cloud. The open platform is launching with about 35 pre-built application and software integrations, the company said.

From there, the platform applies AI to the data, including data from third party tools, to provide analysis and correlation, where root cause identification is determined, and automated remediations begin, reducing IT troubleshooting time and costs. The reporting can also be done through integrations with third-party IT services management tools, such as ServiceNow, the company said.

Part of the reason why the launch is so groundbreaking for Riverbed is the sheer number of underlying technologies the platform includes, such as the new Riverbed Unified Agent for the deployment and management of SaaS-delivered visibility modules, including Riverbed’s own Aternity offering for end user experience monitoring and NPM+ for network and cloud monitoring – to collect more data without adding agents. It also includes Riverbed Data Store, which consumes, analyzes, and reports on petabytes of data and Topology Viewer, which offers up dynamic mapping of connected devices to help put data into context.

“Customers have a need to collect more data all the time, particularly with AI. More data collection generally requires more agents,” Donatelli said. “What we’re able to do is solve two problems at once. By going to a common agent, we reduce the amount of agents that customers have. But in addition to that, since it’s a common agent that can do many things, we solve this other problem customers have, which is they need to collect more data in these blind spots, such as like cloud, or for people working from home. We consider this a really foundational piece of both our architecture, and then a new product that people can use.”

A first of its kind feature that solves another major visibility gap, according to the company, is Riverbed Aternity Mobile, a mobile monitoring tool that lets IT teams proactively identify digital experience performance issues on enterprise-provided mobile devices and then take targeted remediation actions. Aternity Mobile works on Apple iOS and Android devices.

“By bringing in mobility, everything from doctors using iPads to do electronic medical records, all the way to the power company coming out to look at an outage, people now can manage those in a centralized fashion and make sure that the experience on those for both the employees and the customer that they’re ultimately giving service to is good,” Donatelli said.

On the data collection and visibility side, new offerings also include Riverbed NPM+, what the company is calling the first in a series of SaaS-delivered NPM services, with data collection accomplished by using Riverbed Unified Agent at the endpoint. The tool works by overcoming network blind spots created by remote work, public clouds, and encrypted architectures such as Zero Trust environments by pushing packet visibility to network locations where monitoring was previously not possible, including for encrypted tunnels in Zero Trust architectures.

“We’re really excited about NPM+ … which uncovers blind spots that exist by things like zero trust architectures, [which] kind of prevent the way NPM products have traditionally worked,” he said.

Another feature is Riverbed NetProfiler, which offers real-time visibility into network traffic and application performance. The offering now can monitor SD-WAN health and performance for third-party products such as Cisco Viptela SD-WAN and VeloCloud SD-WAN.

Riverbed IQ 2.0

First introduced in 2022, that latest version of Riverbed IQ employs AIOps features such as the Riverbed Data Store and Topology Viewer, as well as automation, Donatelli said. The Riverbed IQ 2.0 release has at its disposal an expanded data collection sources and expanding library of 170 pre-built Aternity remediations and tools to create customized remediations, the company said.

Riverbed IQ 2.0 is very secure because Riverbed’s AI is based on customers’ data, not outside data, Donatelli said.

“The way our products work is we collect full telemetry on networks [and] full telemetry on our endpoints. Therefore, the way AI works is the more accurate your data, the better your machine learning, the better your results. And that’s what our system does,” he said.

Riverbed is relying heavily on the channel as a route to market for the new observability platform. In fact, Riverbed’s channel partners now have exclusive access to midmarket customers, Donatelli said.

Donatelli joined Riverbed in 2023 from MarkLogic, a data management and data integration solution provider and Vector Capital portfolio company. The longtime tech executive previously held positions for the Cloud Business Group at Oracle and before that, the enterprise group for HP.