Gigamon and Riverbed Join Forces to Deliver a Comprehensive Network Visibility and Performance Management Solution

The Riverbed Network and Application Performance Platform enables organizations to visualize, optimize, accelerate and remediate the performance of any network for any application. Riverbed capabilities include WAN optimization, network performance management, application acceleration and enterprise-grade SD-WAN.

The Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline captures all information-in-motion, from raw packets to apps, across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure; processes it and sends it to the tools and teams that need it. Using a single integrated platform, digital teams can choose advanced capabilities for easing network burdens, analyzing applications, and detecting and responding to threats.

Better Together

Just about every technology company has a program created to partner with other industry counterparts. These programs leverage the respective products and services to create complementary and integrated joint solutions. Good technology partnerships develop joint solutions that are greater than the sum of its parts.

What makes a technology partnership great? Great and meaningful technology partnerships develop synergies in several organizational functions beyond the product integration to include sales efforts, marketing plans, routes to market, communications, support and more. Great partnerships provide value for both sides that make the product better and continually develop more satisfied customers. The Riverbed + Gigamon partnership is a great one.

Joint Solution Overview — Unified NPM and Deep Observability Pipeline

Both Riverbed and Gigamon are leaders in their respective categories, Riverbed in network performance management (NPM) and Gigamon as a Visibility and Analytics Fabric (VAF) provider. Gigamon captures all data from the network across all infrastructure from on-premise to private and public clouds and makes it easier and more efficient for Riverbed NPM and security tools to use. Riverbed blends network, infrastructure, application and user experience visibility to provide a unified view of performance and security.

Gigamon delivers a visibility and analytics fabric/monitoring infrastructure platform that sits between the network data layer and the NPM and security layer. Gigamon simplifies the process of tapping the network in multiple places and feeding multiple tools. The Gigamon VAF delivers pervasive visibility into all data in motion across the entire network. The Gigamon approach makes network enhancements easier and safer, tools more efficient and operations less staff-intensive.

Riverbed AppResponse, packet-based application performance management, leverages the Gigamon packet data. Riverbed NetProfiler, network flow monitoring, leverages Gigamon flow data and metadata. Gigamon VAF can also offload some of the heavy lifting when it comes to packet intelligence, such as filtering, load balancing, SSL/TLS decryption, packet slicing and time stamping.

With this data collected, the Riverbed NPM solution can focus more specifically on analysis and reporting, which provides the insights needed for IT to optimize the performance of the network, applications and end user experiences. Riverbed’s unified NPM solution is unique. It collects data across physical, virtual and cloud environments. It collects and stores all packet data, all flow data, and all device metrics, all the time so it’s always there for analysis when you need it. The Riverbed NPM solution can also integrate this diverse cross-domain data into a single, unified portal for a comprehensive view of enterprise performance that can be viewed by all user groups, including executives, line-of-business users, app owners, and other domain-level experts. Each group or person can have a tailored and unique view into the data. 

Performance and Security Use Cases

The joint solution can be used for several use cases, including:

• Network traffic analysis is the process of recording, reviewing and analyzing network traffic for the purpose of performance, security or general network operations and management. 
• Network and application troubleshooting use packets and flow records to identify, diagnose and resolve problems within the network and applications traversing the network.
• Infrastructure management monitors metrics about the operations of the devices and servers comprising an IT environment. It ensures everything functions as expected to support its applications and services.
• Network detection and response identifies and prevents unauthorized access, misuse or modification of a network and network-accessible resources. 
• Cloud monitoring provides pre-, during and post-migration analysis of cloud-based network and application performance.

Customer Success Story — A Global Oil and Gas Company

A Global 500 company operates in more than 70 countries, has a retail fuel network of more than 44,000 service stations and produces 3.7 million barrels of oil daily. With an IT environment that touches every aspect of its business, this company pays dearly when things go wrong. On average, an issue that disrupts service costs the company between $100,000 and $250,000.

Identifying the cause of problems is complicated by the size of the environment (10 global datacenters, 400 regional datacenters, 150,000 end users). The company’s in-house performance management system, which is built on the Riverbed NPM and the Gigamon VAF, has reduced the number of situations by up to 45 percent, saving the company millions of dollars annually. Mean time to resolution has been cut in half. With less downtime for business-critical applications, users have a better perception of this energy company’s move toward location-independent computing and the company’s push towards a cloud-first strategy.

Great partnerships are proven ultimately by their joint customer successes. Riverbed and Gigamon have thousands of happy joint customers.

To learn more about the Gigamon and Riverbed partnership, check out the Riverbed technology partner page.