Riverbed Technology LLC is updating its observability platform with new artificial intelligence tools that will help companies fix technical issues quicker.

The company detailed the enhancements today.

Redwood City, California-based Riverbed went public in 2006 and was acquired by an investor consortium for $3.6 billion eight years later. Today, its observability platform is used by thousands of organizations including most of the Fortune 100. The software can spot technical issues in cloud environments, on-premises environments, employee devices and other technology assets.

Under the hood, Riverbed’s platform is powered by a data management engine called the Data Store. It can analyze up to petabytes of technical information from a company’s technology environments. Data Store automatically indexes the ingested records, which means it creates shortcuts that make it possible to find specific items faster.

The new release of the platform that Riverbed detailed today will ship with a generative AI tool called IQ Assist. According to the company, it visualizes technical issues in a graphical interface and suggests remediation methods. The tool can optionally sync incident data to external applications such as ServiceNow that administrators use to tackle outages.

Another new AI tool, Predictive AI, is designed to help companies spot future technical issues and fix them ahead of time. It identifies latency fluctuations with the potential to negatively impact an application’s user experience. The tool also detects situations where workloads strain the infrastructure on which they run.

After identifying a potential technical issue, administrators can remediate it with a third new capability called Agentic AI. This solution provides IT teams with customizable automation without requiring coding enabling them to drag-and-drop intelligent, task-specific AI agents that they can control.

“Customers want to consolidate observability tools, deploy AI that delivers ROI, and feed their enterprise data repositories,” said Chief Executive Officer Dave Donatelli.

The new AI features are rolling out alongside enhancements to the company’s Unified Agent, a single agent platform for deploying and managing Riverbed and third-party modules, eliminating agent fatigue, and reducing multiple agent conflict. Customers install the agent on the systems they wish to monitor for errors.

Riverbed is delivering new data collection modules through the Riverbed Unified Agent to reduce blind spots and proactively resolve issues. The Unified Communication Module allows IT to gather real-time telemetry from collaboration services such as Zoom and Microsoft to solve UC problems before they impact users. According to Riverbed, a second new module can collect data about Thunderbolt peripherals and WiFi connectivity ports of computers powered by Intel Corp. silicon, enabling IT to proactively identify and resolve technical issues in computer peripherals and ensure Intel devices can perform at peak levels.

Rounding out the update is a third module dubbed the NPM+ Packet Capture. It will enable the Unified Agent to monitor network traffic from employees’ Windows, Mac and Linux computers. Network traffic can contain useful information about a range of cybersecurity issues, such as cloud applications that are used by employees without permission.

Riverbed’s observability platform includes a component called Aternity that helps companies check their software for user experience issues. Aternity can, for example, point out if a certain interface section loads slowly. As part of today’s update, Riverbed launched Kubernetes Operator designed to automate operational tasks including deployments, upgrades, and backups in Kubernetes-driven ecosystems, which frees up IT teams to resolve issues more quickly and focus on performance and reliability.

Most of the enhancements the company detailed today are available immediately. The two exceptions are the Agent AI and NPM+ Packet Capture tools, which will launch in the second and third quarters, respectively. 

Image: Riverbed