Seven Differentiators of Riverbed IQ Unified Observability Service

What sets Riverbed IQ apart from other observability solutions? We end our customer presentation with a list of Riverbed IQ’s key differentiators that make Riverbed IQ’s ecosystem “a big deal,” according to a recent analyst briefing with IDC. With that in mind, here are the ones IDC also considers important for standing out in the hyper-competitive observability market:

Differentiator #1: Unlock the power of full-fidelity telemetry

Riverbed IQ’s approach to unified observability begins with the full-fidelity telemetry that our market-leading NPM and DEM products rely on. While today we leverage network, infrastructure, and end user experience metrics, the future will bring support for APM and device metrics. Because we capture everything and we don’t sample, and because Riverbed IQ analyzes over 10 million data points per minute, you’ll never miss an impactful performance problem.

Differentiator #2: Apply intelligence to problem detection

Monitoring for past decade has used rule-based alerting. It’s time consuming to set up and the thresholds are seldom reviewed often enough to be meaningful. This often leads to over alerting, creating a high volume of alerts that are often false positives of an impactful issue.

Riverbed IQ removes the need for rule-based alerting by using machine learning and logic built by a data science team. The analytics in Riverbed IQ learn what is normal for a specific device, interface, or application, and then passes the problem on to automated investigations only when something is outside normally behavior and in the range of creating a performance issue.

Riverbed IQ leverages AI and machine learning (ML) to correlate and accurately identify cross-domain insights to surface only business-impacting events. It applies 10,000+ correlations per minute across devices, locations, and applications and displays the associated events by “Most Impacted Users, Locations and Apps” so IT can quickly see the worst problems and their impact on the business.

Differentiator #3: Automate the investigation process​

Riverbed IQ also leverages automated, investigative workflows to handle the scale and complexity of today’s IT environments.​ These low-code runbooks replicate the best practices of expert IT teams. Pre-built runbooks gather evidence, build context, and set priorities to enable IT teams to save time, reduce escalations, and turn knowledge that resides in the minds of a few experts into knowledge that is usable by all IT. By spreading the burden for troubleshooting across the entire team, your highly skilled experts can now focus on high-value digital transformation projects rather than spending all day troubleshooting.

Differentiator #4: Codify expert knowledge​

Riverbed IQ codifies the institutional knowledge that resides with IT experts and turns it into automated runbooks that can easily be customized to your organization’s specific requirements. These automated troubleshooting workflows (or runbooks) enable more IT staff to troubleshoot effectively. By spreading the burden across more people, Riverbed IQ reduces the risk that expert resources get burnt out and empower all IT staff to learn faster and take on more responsibility.

Differentiator #5: Empower NetOps in hybrid work environments​

Prior to the pandemic, when users worked in branch offices, the NetOps team was responsible for identifying network access and performance issues for end users accessing business applications. Surprisingly, that didn’t change when users went remote. NetOps is still responsible for identifying network access and performance issues for end users, even though they are blind to remote work problems.

By leveraging Riverbed end user experience metrics, Riverbed IQ removes these blind spots to enable network teams to:

• Establish the scope and severity of remote work issue so that they can prioritize and determine whether they need to escalate it.
• Determine the root cause, whether it’s an ISP, CASB, application, or security issue, and estimate when the issue might be resolved (for example, an ISP issues takes more time and an internal issue).
• Document the incident, understand its impact on end users, and communicate to the affected users.

Differentiator #6: Focus on what’s important

The combination of AI/ML and codified runbooks is unique. We’ve spoken with hundreds of customers who have been burned before by black box AI/ML, where they have no insight into why they got the results they did. By pairing the results of Riverbed IQ’s AI/ML correlations with our transparent runbooks, IT can see exactly why Riverbed IQ highlighted the issues it did. They can trust the output because they can always customize runbooks to their organization’s needs.

No competitive solution offers this combination of capabilities that leads to quicker resolutions, without having to escalate to your IT experts as often.

Differentiator #7: Riverbed Unified Observability Platform

Next in the list of differentiators is the Riverbed Unified Observability Platform, which provides comprehensive, standards-based cloud-native capabilities to enable Riverbed engineers to quickly create new Riverbed unified observability services and customers to deploy and administer them.

Deployed on Azure, the Riverbed Unified Observability Platform supports a suite of SaaS-based observability tools that IT can deploy quickly, administer securely, and scale seamlessly. The Riverbed platform centralizes authentication, privacy, and provisioning so IT can efficiently administer multiple observability services. It provides capabilities for ingesting, correlating, and storing massive volumes of data that supports observability use cases for today’s highly distributed IT infrastructures. With advanced AI and ML-powered analysis and the workflow engines, the Riverbed platform enables new services that streamline repetitive tasks so IT can deliver better digital experience.

About Riverbed IQ

To summarize, Riverbed IQ is a cloud-native, SaaS-delivered, open and programmable solution for Unified Observability that empowers all IT staff to identify and fix problems efficiently. It uses full-fidelity end user experience and network performance data to gain a complete picture of your environment. It applies AI and machine learning (ML) to correlate disparate data streams and identify business-impacting events. This intelligence also informs investigative runbooks that replicate the troubleshooting workflows of IT experts. The investigative runbooks gather additional context, filter out noise, and set priorities—reducing the volume of alerts to the most business impacting, and empowering staff at all skill levels to identify and solve problems fast. ​

To learn more about Riverbed IQ’s key differentiators, visit www.riverbed.com/riverbed-iq.