Enhancing network cloud visibility

Riverbed has added more critical cloud visibility and reporting capabilities to its industry-leading end-to-end visibility solutions – including support of Azure NSG and AWS VPC flow logs. Key updates to the Riverbed Network Performance Management (NPM) portfolio—the leading and only unified network visibility solution that collects every packet, all flows and all infrastructure metrics, 100% of the time–-delivers greater cloud visibility that is crucial to monitoring productivity and performance, as organizations continue to shift toward hybrid and multi-cloud network environments. 

As part of Riverbed’s Unified NPM solution, Riverbed NetProfiler enables organizations to achieve full-fidelity network flow monitoring to proactively identify and quickly troubleshoot performance and security issues. The new features introduced today improve cloud visibility by supporting native Azure NSG flow logs and augment support for AWS VPC flow logs. Riverbed automates reporting capabilities for AWS VPC flow logs to enrich information sharing. Riverbed is also introducing a modernized user interface (UI) with a new home screen and simplified search functionality, making NetProfiler easier to use and helps NetOps and SecOps users to more quickly resolve network issues. 

“Today’s release of Riverbed NetProfiler is critical to NetOps and SecOps and is focused on gaining more in-depth traffic insights from Azure and AWS flow logs to proactively identify and quickly remediate performance and security issues while gaining cost and latency efficiencies. It also relieves the loss of visibility in migrating applications to Azure or AWS Cloud,” said David Winikoff, Vice President, Product Management at Riverbed. “Additionally, the new home page and search features make it easier for helpdesk and support users to solve problems, while still serving Riverbed’s traditional power users. Riverbed is delivering end-to-end visibility—across users, networks and applications—enabling organizations to modernize and secure their networks, accelerate cloud and SaaS migrations, improve business productivity and advance hybrid and work-from-anywhere environments.” 

Support for Azure NSG Flow Logs  

The new Riverbed NetProfiler supports the ingestion of Azure NSG flow logs, the native mechanism of flow generation offered by the Azure platform. Using this Azure flow data, Riverbed NetProfiler provides two specific Azure cloud reports: Azure NSG Flow Information and Azure Billable Data Transfer.   

The Azure NSG Flow Information report shows applications, hosts, and conversations by VNETs, Regions, and Availability Zones. Most importantly, it can map application relationships across the network for any service, addressing that top concern. NetProfiler’s extensive traffic reporting can also be used to study and provide reports on Azure NSG flow log AWS VPC flow logs data. The Azure Billing Data Transfer report helps organizations understand where cloud costs are occurring to make better plans and decisions to help minimize them. This report provides visibility into traffic volumes by Azure pricing policies to help organizations gain pricing and latency efficiencies.   

AWS VPC Flow Log support updates  

The previous release of Riverbed NPM supported AWS VPC Flow Log support, but it required organizations to manually configure and maintain AWS hostgroups to run the AWS visibility reports. With recent improvements made by AWS to AWS VPC Flow Logs, Riverbed NetProfiler now utilizes those improvements and automates hostgroups for a simpler and less error-prone process. Riverbed NetProfiler polls the AWS Management Console for the metadata and populates the corresponding AWS hostgroup definitions.  

Updated Home Page UI and Search 

Riverbed NetProfiler introduced new features that modernizes the UI with a new home page that provides greater insight and simplified search functionality. The new home screen helps new or infrequent users quickly understand how the network and applications are performing, what issues need attention, and how issues are trending. Organizations can easily search or contextually drill deeper into the data. The at-a-glance performance summaries can be customized on a per-user basis. The updated version allows organizations to toggle between last hour, last day or last week timeframes, and this insight loads quickly ensuring fast responsiveness to performance queries.   

Improved security  

Riverbed NetProfiler now supports the Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol 1.3 for its services, including syslogs. Out of the box, new systems are now installed with a minimum of TLS 1.2 and 2048-bit cipher certificates. TLS allows client/server applications to communicate over the Internet in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering and message forgery.