Building on its acquisition of Aternity in July, Riverbed announced today that it is adding new capabilities to its SteelCentral monitoring platform to address the performance needs of large enterprises.

These new enhancements essentially blend end-user experience, infrastructure management, application performance, and network performance into one system.

“Fragmented experience is something that needs to be continually improved, and we are trying to find ways to simplify that for folks,” says Erik Hille director of product marketing with Riverbed. “In the past we had some overlapping solutions that we are now consolidating, and what we end up with is one system that combines analytics, end-user experience, application performance, and infrastructure management.”

The enterprise and enhanced end-user experience technology comes from Aternity and enables users to monitor their applications from their own device whether it be mobile phone, laptop, or desktop, says Hille.

Additionally, SteelCentral’s NetIM replaces SteelCentral NetCollector and NetSensor features with a single system enabling companies to capture infrastructure information, detect performance issues, map application network paths, and troubleshoot infrastructure issues.

Another feature is the SteelCentral AppResponse 11, which combines the capabilities of SteelCentral’s two previous monitoring products. It now provides application analytics as well as end-user experience analytics. This feature replaces the need for users to access packet analysis, decreasing the mean time to resolution (MTTR).

The overall goal here is to help companies find blind spots in their networks as they migrate to cloud and software-defined networking (SDN) without having to worry about configuration or infrastructure management, Hille says.

From the network perspective, this helps identify problems in the network much more quickly than before. SteelCentral also now features a more flexible alerting engine with filters to make sure that false positives are weeded out of the equation.

“In the context of troubleshooting, when trying to identify an ongoing problem with the blended view, you can drill down to exactly where the problem is occurring,” Hille says.

He claims that there are few competitors that cover all of these different areas in a unified view and many will focus on a single component of a domain.

Riverbed’s customer base spans across all types of medium to large enterprises that are interested in performance management across a number of domains.