Riverbed SteelCentral Overview
Riverbed SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead is a comprehensive management and monitoring solution designed to optimize, manage, and troubleshoot network and application performance across hybrid WAN environments.
Key Functionality
Hybrid WAN Management
- Hybrid WAN Management: The SteelCentral Controller enables users to leverage and control hybrid WANs, allowing for the accelerated delivery of critical applications over faster, more secure networks, while less-critical applications can be delivered over the public Internet.
- Application Performance and Path Management: It simplifies application performance and path management, ensuring secure service-level delivery for business-critical applications. The controller uses intent-based, global business policies to dynamically select the best path for application traffic.
Configuration and Monitoring
- Centralized Management: The SteelCentral Controller acts as an enterprise management and reporting tool, allowing users to manage, configure, and monitor Riverbed products such as SteelHead CX, SteelHead EX, SteelHead Interceptor, and other Riverbed appliances through a web-based interface.
- Configuration Management: It streamlines the configuration and ongoing management of large SteelHead deployments, including group features for consistent configurations and cluster management for SteelHead Interceptor appliances.
Performance Monitoring and Reporting
Performance Metrics
- Performance Metrics: The controller provides detailed performance monitoring with reporting metrics such as traffic levels, application throughput performance, and TCP session flow characteristics. This helps in diagnosing and fixing network and application performance issues.
- Reporting and Dashboards: It offers flexible reporting on performance improvements, bandwidth usage, bandwidth compression, and specific performance of particular ports, applications, and appliances. Users can view at-a-glance dashboards globally, by sites, and by application.
Troubleshooting and Analysis
Root Cause Analysis
- Root Cause Analysis: When integrated with other Riverbed tools like SteelCentral Transaction Analyzer, it can perform in-depth analysis of user transactions to quickly determine the root cause of performance problems. This involves visualizing multi-tier transactional behavior and identifying primary sources of transaction delay.
- Continuous Monitoring: The solution supports continuous capture capability for troubleshooting intermittent problems and provides automated diagnostic reports that pinpoint performance bottlenecks.
Additional Features
- Security and Optimization: SteelCentral Controller ensures industry-leading secure optimization of all applications across networks, enhancing both security and performance.
- Network Audit and Compliance: While not a direct feature of the SteelCentral Controller, the broader SteelCentral suite includes tools like SteelCentral NetAuditor, which performs network-wide compliance checks, analyzes device configurations, and identifies security violations and policy violations.
Conclusion
In summary, the Riverbed SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead is a powerful tool for managing, monitoring, and optimizing network and application performance in hybrid WAN environments. It offers robust configuration management, detailed performance monitoring, and advanced troubleshooting capabilities, making it an essential solution for enterprises seeking to enhance their network and application delivery.