NFD26: Troubleshooting with Riverbed, The Story
This blog attempts to summarize noteworthy features from the #NFD26 Riverbed presentations.
For what it’s worth, I’ve blogged about various Riverbed products over the years, network management and other.?Links to Tech Field Day blogs can be found on the TFD Riverbed content page (see link below).
Riverbed has some powerful network management products. They were the subject of the #NFD26 presentations. It was helpful that I’d had several sales meeting with Riverbed a few years ago, on behalf of a Very Large Client, so had some familiarity with the products. The unifying theme for Riverbed is visibility.?
A?blog I wrote recently for GestaltIT?is relevant to the #NFD26 Riverbed presentations. It summarized the main Riverbed NM products and their chief functions.??Well, excluding Aternity, which is a huge product and a separate division within Riverbed.??In any case, the summary in that blog may be useful should you watch the videos of the Riverbed NFD26 presentations.?I'm not going to repeat it here (this blog is too long already!)
Telling a Story
What Riverbed did for #NFD26 was tell a story while demonstrating its “visibility” products in a more or less real-world setting. This is a great idea! It presents a use case, and people generally get more engaged when there’s a storyline. In this case, the story line was, what was causing poor customer experience, a classic “Who Dunnit”. The actual execution, well, maybe ran a little long.?
In any case, if you want, you can fast-forward the video to the strong closing by Phil. You’ll want to know the Solution to the mystery, after all!
So What’s the Story?
The presentation started with a concise description of the customer’s problem. A fictional car rental firm having slow web performance in airport offices as well as for web-based customers. The simulation apparently used real data from Amazon instances, a custom small web app, etc.
Portal?
I recall that Riverbed had an early ability to demo a fair degree of totally customizable drill-down at the time. Unlike some products that are essentially tool kits, Riverbed Portal came with a good starter set of dashboard widgets. That capability is still present, and provides??a GUI “glue” tying together the disparate NM products. My recollection is thin enough after a few years so I can’t speak to whether that capability has been extended, nor to what degree.?
Portal is particularly good for viewing time series data. This lets us do a quick check of RentalApp, the car rental app for customer reservations etc. and staff rental management.?
Aternity
Aternity?is Riverbed’s “heavy duty” application management tool. It used to also be notable for the degree to which it could monitor user activity, in addition to RUM and similar capabilities. It is now positioned as a Digital Experience Monitor. And has only grown more capable. I see it as a strong competitor to Cisco’s AppDynamics.??
Aternity prides itself on being able to trace every activity end-to-end. In particular (and this is a repeated Riverbed theme), Aternity captures every transaction from the device or browser. Through every tier.?
Looking ahead: Network Performance Manager (NPM) captures every network transaction (packets and flows) and analyses them. Application Performance Manager (APM) captures server transactions, etc., and measures OS/VM/Container performance with 1 second granularity.?
Aternity can do Synthetic Web Monitoring, etc. It computes a Digital Experience Index, a measure of user application quality. This is display in concentric circles as shown below. Clicking on a sector drills down. Drilling down on red provides more detail about a problem area.?
Drilling down on the red a couple of times we see that RentalApp is indeed having problems.?
Drilling down on the red a couple of times we see that RentalApp is indeed having problems.?
The presentation showed this off a bit more, ending up discovering that a crypto miner app is running on the servers. Oops! Useful to know about, but apparently not causing the problem of interest.
NetProfiler
Pivoting on device name, the focus of investigation of the security event shifted to NetProfiler. NetProfiler does machine learning on NetFlow data. It stores everything, so you can be certain whether or not something happened – assuming you feed it all the relevant NetFlow. It can alert on performance issues and security issues.?
The demo showed some of the features off and then showed working with different filters to see what was going on.?
The end result was that the demo explored the security issue, which was however not the cause of the RentalApp issue.?
NetIM and Synthetic Testing
The demo then shifted to NetIM, which does SNMP, CLI, and WMI data gathering, and synthetic testing and reporting.?
After some exploration in NetIM, the conclusion was that the network looked OK, but there was a possible DNS issue.?
AppResponse 11
The presentation then shifted to AppResponse.?
Some rather high synthetic user response times were visible. The demo covered various aspects of this. It did get somewhat bogged down for my taste (long day watching presentations!) in being thorough in looking at various filtered data. That’s where video fast forward has the edge on live presentations!
What WAS the Problem?
I’m not giving the answer away! You can easily find it in the last video. Plus, part of the point of the demo was the journey, showcasing what the various Riverbed tools can do. To that point, I realize the above screencaptures don’t tell you much. They’re there to show the flavor of the presentation, which is where you’ll find all the discussion and other screens this blog just does not have room for!
Conclusions
Riverbed has several powerful and complex network / application management products, with security aspects. When deployed appropriately, they provide capture of everything that happens, not just sampled data.?
Their target market is likely big companies, with senior techs who learn and use the powerful Riverbed tools.?
And one conclusion I reached is that comprehensive?synthetic monitoring of key services and apps is one way to quickly see where slow or no response is taking place. Knowing there is a problem and what is affected quickly is a great start on solving the problem.?
Links
NFD26 Riverbed video links:
Comments
Comments are welcome, both in agreement or constructive disagreement about the above. I enjoy hearing from readers and carrying on deeper discussion via comments. Thanks in advance!?
Hashtags:?#NetCraftsmen #CiscoChampion #CCIE25years #NFD26 #Riverbed
Twitter:?@pjwelcher
LinkedIn:?Peter Welcher