Riverbed Technology announced new product releases in its Riverbed SteelCentral product family (formerly known as OPNET and Cascade), SteelCentral AppResponse 9.0 and Riverbed SteelCentral NetProfiler 10.6.

The SteelCentral product family is the only performance management suite that combines user experience, application and network performance management (APM/NPM) to detect and resolve issues before end users notice.

AppResponse 9.0 and NetProfiler 10.6 include new capabilities to simplify web application monitoring so IT teams can share data more easily, identify trends faster, and make performance data more relevant to users. New features in these releases include a web console, out-of-the-box and customizable dashboard templates and a global view of the end-user experience. Together, these new features provide diverse IT teams with a holistic picture of end-user experience for web applications across the network resulting in improved IT efficiency, enhanced business continuity and revenue preservation.

“Users expect and businesses rely on network operations teams to ensure optimal performance for critical applications – otherwise, employees can’t work, product developers miss deadlines, sales can’t sell and customers don’t buy,” said Nik Koutsoukos, Senior Director Product Marketing, SteelCentral. “Effectively managing network performance in today’s globally complex networks – that include data centers, public and private clouds and virtualized environments –requires an integrated view that gives all relevant teams visibility into and control over network and application performance. This enables organizations to deliver applications in whatever way is most effective without regard to technical constraints, network limitations, IT complexity or user location or device. We call this location-independent computing, and only Riverbed can deliver true end-to-end visibility and solve latency and bandwidth issues – all required ingredients for delivering location-independent computing.”

New in SteelCentral AppResponse 9.0:

- Customizable web app monitoring. Business-critical applications are increasingly being delivered as web applications that are difficult to monitor with legacy NPM tools. This release allows IT to tailor analysis, reporting and monitoring for custom Web applications.

- New web console with Quick Views. Simplifies the set up and analysis of information empowering collaboration between teams with easy ways to share data and identify trends faster.

- Geographic end-user experience views. Employees and customers access web apps from all over the world, on all sorts of devices and network types. AppResponse 9.0 shows how performance at a glance across the globe – by location, browser, device and platform type – so IT can focus triage efforts on the most critically affected users.

- IPv6 support. For organizations starting to leverage IPv6 for external connectivity, AppResponse 9.0 provides visibility into IPv6-enabled application performance, packets and response time so IT can monitor IPv6-enabled applications the same as IPv4 apps.

New in SteelCentral NetProfiler 10.6:

- SteelCentral Dashboard integration. SteelCentral Dashboards provide teams across the IT organization with an integrated view of the complete picture – application code, infrastructure performance, network issues – but also enables them to drill down into domain-specific tools for additional detail. SteelCentral NetProfiler has been integrated with SteelCentral Dashboards to provide network-specific details such as Top Interface and Top Talker information, with seamless, contextual drill down.

- Dashboard templates. Similar to AppResponse Quick Views, NetProfiler dashboard templates simplify setup to deliver baseline visibility so that different teams can be on the same page and share common views right away.

Both SteelCentral AppResponse 9.0 and SteelCentral NetProfiler 10.6 are currently available.