Riverbed rolls out new AI-powered observability features

Riverbed Technology LLC is updating its observability platform with new artificial intelligence tools that will help companies fix technical issues quicker.

The company detailed the enhancements today.

Redwood City, California-based Riverbed went public in 2006 and was acquired by an investor consortium for $3.6 billion eight years later. Today, its observability platform is used by thousands of organizations including most of the Fortune 100. The software can spot technical issues in cloud environments, on-premises environments, employee devices and other technology assets.

Under the hood, Riverbed’s platform is powered by a data management engine called the Data Store. It can analyze up to petabytes of technical information from a company’s technology environments. Data Store automatically indexes the ingested records, which means it creates shortcuts that make it possible to find specific items faster.

The new release of the platform that Riverbed detailed today will ship with a tool called IQ Assist. According to the company, it visualizes technical issues in a graphical interface and suggests remediation methods. The tool can optionally sync incident data to external applications such as ServiceNow that administrators use to tackle outages.

Another new AI tool, Predictive AI, is designed to help companies spot future technical issues and fix them ahead of time. It identifies latency fluctuations with the potential to negatively impact an application’s user experience. The tool also detects situations where workloads strain the infrastructure on which they run.

After identifying a potential technical issue, administrators can remediate it with a third new capability called Agentic AI. It provides access to AI agents that can automate some of the manual work involved in the troubleshooting process. Riverbed says that customers can deploy agents through a drag-and-drop interface.

“Customers want to consolidate observability tools, deploy AI that delivers ROI, and feed their enterprise data repositories,” said Chief Executive Officer Dave Donatelli.

The new AI features are rolling out alongside enhancements to the company’s Unified Agent. This is the agent, or lightweight program, that Riverbed’s platform uses to collect data about technical issues. Customers install the agent on the systems they wish to monitor for errors. 

The Unified Agent is receiving a module that will allow it to gather telemetry from collaboration services such as Zoom and Microsoft. According to Riverbed, a second new module can collect data about the Wi-Fi modem and Thunderbolt ports of a computer powered by Intel Corp. silicon. That information is useful for detecting technical issues in computer peripherals.

Rounding out the update is a third module dubbed the NPM+ Packet Capture. It will enable the Unified Agent to monitor network traffic from employees’ Windows, Mac and Linux computers. Network traffic can contain useful information about a range of cybersecurity issues, such as cloud applications that are used by employees without permission.

Riverbed’s observability platform includes a component called Aternity that helps companies check their software for user experience issues. Aternity can, for example, point out if a certain interface section loads slowly. As part of today’s update, Riverbed is making the tool easier to install in Kubernetes clusters and virtual desktop environments.

Most of the enhancements the company detailed today are available immediately. The two exceptions are the Agent AI and NPM+ Packet Capture tools, which will launch in the second and third quarters, respectively. 

Image: Riverbed