Business managers, CTOs, developers and vendors are all quibbling over what makes the perfect cloud infrastructure. Will this recipe be single-cloud or multi-cloud? Will it be hybrid with a dash of on-prem or a heap?

While they disagree on some particulars, most agree that it will involve multiple environments and much greater sprawl than the infrastructure of old. Some are finding they haven’t enough eyes to keep all these disparate points in scope. That is where application-visibility technology comes in.

Mike Sargent, SVP and GM of SteelCentral at Riverbed Technology, Inc., argues that recent innovation has come at the cost of manageability. “In terms of end-to-end services that folks really care about that are app enabled, it’s really hard to see what’s going on,” he told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Riverbed Disrupt conference. “Visibility is getting worse while apps are getting far more important,” he stated.

No silver bullet

As of yet, Sargent said, there is no silver bullet — meaning there is no simple switch to flip to enable total visibility of all your environments. He said the solution is to bring together all the disparate data sets into one portal — a formidable challenge for in-house IT teams, but possible with SteelCentral (Riverbed’s command center for application performance). The end goal is to gain insight into what is going on at all levels — from device to application to the wire.

“It could be packets and flows will help you do it; it could be code-level metrics. And so what we’re doing is we’re pulling together those disparate data sets in that composite so we can apply the analytics on top of that and provide the insights for the particular use case in question,” Sargent explained.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Riverbed Disrupt.

Photo by SiliconANGLE