Riverbed Extends Big Data Analysis to Application Performance Management

Application performance company Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology is now applying big data collection and analysis techniques to application performance management. Big data techniques offer application support, developer, and QA teams deep insight into the end-user experience, speeding problem diagnosis, increasing IT efficiency, and improving application service levels.

The company said that OPNET AppInternals Xpert provides these capabilities through the combination of Transaction Trace Warehouse, a comprehensive record of all application transactions, and big data analytics.

In a statement, said Alain Cohen, co-founder of OPNET Technologies (News - Alert) and chief technology officer, Riverbed Performance Management, "The full potential of application performance management lies in exploiting the information that resides in large volumes of detailed data about transaction performance and behavior."

 "Our big data capabilities go far beyond traditional statistical performance summaries by enabling massive retention of transactional data and powerful unstructured search that gives IT the ability to quickly find and analyze the right set of transactions to definitively answer questions. Equipped with these capabilities, IT organizations can rapidly detect performance problems and pinpoint their root causes before users or the business are impacted," added Cohen.

Riverbed said that the scale, diversity, and granularity of data required to comprehensively manage application performance quickly overwhelms traditional performance management solutions. Redundant and virtualized infrastructure, load-balanced applications, and service-oriented architectures further contribute to the exploding volume of available performance data. Given the volume and speed of available data, analytics are essential to identify potential threats and service disruptions. 

Although, the enterprise IT organizations are rapidly becoming overloaded with data, TRAC Research’s president and principal analyst Bojon Simic thinks that many of them still lack the complete visibility and insight they need to resolve issues quickly and communicate a view of what is really going on with application performance. However, by incorporating big data techniques into performance management, organizations can get to the root cause of problems faster and gain new views into patterns that can make their organization more efficient, said Simic.