Riverbed IQ 2.0: Revolutionizing IT Operations with AI-Driven Unified Observability

Exclusive Interview with Salman Ali, Senior Manager – Solution Engineering, META, Riverbed Technology

The introduction of Riverbed IQ 2.0 was one of your company’s biggest product launches this year. Can you tell us about this solution and its evolution?

During late 2022, we announced Riverbed IQ, our cloud-native, SaaS-delivered Unified Observability service that empowers IT with actionable insights to remediate problems faster and improve the digital experience. As we continue to drive innovation, we have been closely engaging with our customers incorporating their feedback to shape the ongoing evolution of our solutions.

As a result, we recently unveiled new capabilities which expand Riverbed IQ’s reach of machine learning and automated investigations to include end user experience telemetry from Riverbed Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM) and key metrics from Riverbed AppResponse to solve issues in remote and SASE environments as well as integrate with third-party tools. Riverbed IQ enables IT organisations to “shift left,” enabling all staff to do the job of more experienced IT experts, freeing-up senior IT staff to focus on strategic business initiatives.

We have evolved IQ to its current version, Riverbed IQ 2.0, by building on top of its existing features adding AI that conducts analysis and correlation on petabytes of real data using the Riverbed Data Store. We have also added in Topology Viewer to help put data in context by generating a real-time map of connected devices. This visualisation shows dependencies within our customers’ evolving and dynamic IT environments, making AI even more actionable.

At Riverbed, we ensure our customers’ past IT investments are protected and utilised to their potential. This is why we have focused on developing an open platform with comprehensive 3^rd party integrations. With this iteration of the solution, we also have an ever-growing library of application integrations with observability, security, ITSM, productivity, and process vendors.  These integrations allow IQ to pull more data in for correlation and automation, or to export actionable insights to solutions like ServiceNow, Teams, etc.  This number will continue to grow and help to automate even more actions.

In short, Riverbed IQ 2.0 is the realisation of the enhancements requested by our customers to make our automations more flexible, provide open integration with third parties, and support more data types/metrics for better results.

Can you tell us about the AI model used in this solution?

We use multi-modal AI techniques including causal AI and predictive AI. As part of our future roadmap, we are exploring applications of Generative AI specifically focused on IT Operations use-cases. Our customers are seeing strong results with the combination of starting with great data, and adding AI, correlation and automation into a seamless workflow.

How does customer experience and feedback play into Riverbed’s product development cycle?

The Riverbed Platform Architecture is based on 3 main pillars – Collect; Analyse & Automate; and Report. This circle is completed upon remediations being applied and outputs being fed back into the system using artificial intelligence for impact, insights, and actionable recommendations. Riverbed IQ 2.0 seeks continuous feedback to identify user experience issues, take targeted prescriptive actions, and enhance employee productivity, satisfaction, service quality, and overall business performance.

This approach allows IT teams to pinpoint areas that require improvement and implement targeted measures and remediations to optimise digital experience. With our solution’s ability to offer flexible survey components, customers can get an accurate assessment of user satisfaction across various devices and locations. Ultimately, this empowers their employees and drives productivity, resulting in better overall business performance. By tightly correlating quantitative and qualitative measures, we offer the most comprehensive view of the digital employee experience, setting a new standard for DEX.

What frameworks and best practices guided the development of Riverbed IQ 2.0?

The most important thing we recognise is that to have good AI results, you need good data. We therefore use real data, not synthetic or sampled data to feed into our AI models. In fact, our solution collects and aggregates the most accurate data in the marketplace, across all devices, all applications, and all clicks. Such comprehensive data gathering has the potential to create complexity, but we have avoided this by offering a single Unified Agent that allows our customers to collect more sources of data without need for more agents​.

And finally, we recognise the value of collaboration and standardisation. We have therefore built this as an open platform that lets our customers integrate with 3^rd party data. This means even stronger AI results, and the flexibility for our customers to work the way they want. Our data store makes AI actionable and without the need for customers to build their own data structure​.