Software-defined wide-area network provider Riverbed Technology Inc. has enhanced its Riverbed SteelCentral network performance monitor with better information, improved analytics support and support for containers.

The company also announced an alliance with Zscaler Inc. to deliver a secure cloud-based service aimed at branch and remote offices. Riverbed is targeting the market for digital experience management, or products that improve customer experiences, regardless of whether components of a service are on-premises, in the cloud or in a hybrid environment.

When investigating performance issues, SteelCentral users can now better analyze device, application, network and infrastructure health traffic from a single point, the company said. Among the new features is the ability to stitch together log messages into application performance data for an end-to-end record of every transaction, which is helpful in troubleshooting performance issues and application errors. Users can search for a log message and locate every application activity that generated it, explore the application trace and locate exactly where in the call stack a message was generated.

The company’s Aternity multiplatform performance manager has been integrated with ServiceNow Inc.’s information technology service management platform for closed-loop troubleshooting and ticketing. Aternity will automatically generate tickets if certain performance thresholds are exceeded, and provide support staff with extensive troubleshooting information.

The new SteelCentral also supports monitoring of container and application performance without requiring modifications to the container image, thus enabling a wider range of containerized applications to be deployed. Management can be handled with popular container orchestrators like Kubernetes or Docker Inc.’s Swarm.

The company also introduced a 40 gigabit-per-second network interface card for use with SteelCentral that doubles flow capacity to 20 million deduplicated or 200 million raw flows per minute.

A new Performance Command Center covers user, network, application and infrastructure performance domains to enable customers to more flexibly deploy services on premises or in the Amazon Web Services Inc. or Microsoft Corp. clouds. Service can then be managed by Riverbed, a partner or as a hosted service.

The partnership with cloud security vendor Zscaler enables organizations to securely connect to applications regardless of where they reside. Zscaler is being integrated into SteelConnect Manager’s application-defined policy and orchestration engine to streamline the process of identifying and steering traffic to the Zscaler Security Cloud.

The combination automatically recognizes the presence of Zscaler Enforcement Nodes and dynamically chooses the optimal one for each site in the SteelConnect network, Riverbed said. This significantly reduces the time needed to deploy virtual networks in branch offices.

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