Riverbed updated its SteelCentral — an application optimization product — to address blind spots that have emerged as businesses connect their headquarters and branch offices to the cloud. It also updated SteelCentral to monitor applications in its software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) offering.

To address blind spots, Riverbed created some software-as-a-service (SaaS) to provide cloud-based performance management. And the company also extended its application monitoring to any endpoint.

The new SaaS within SteelCentral integrates application monitoring with network performance monitoring. According to Riverbed, traditional app monitoring tools are blind to network performance issues, which can affect applications.

Riverbed has also extended SteelCentral’s capabilities to more end points. It can now monitor applications whether they run on physical, virtual, or mobile devices. These capabilities stem from Riverbed’s recent acquisition of Aternity. The Aternity technology can gather data from a broad range of sources, including app servers, application code, UC systems, LANs, WANs, browsers, and end-user devices.

SteelCentral SaaS is currently available in beta to select participants and is targeted to be generally available in December.

Riverbed is also integrating SteelCentral visibility into its SD-WAN product SteelConnect 2.0.

Some other SD-WAN companies use third party vendors to monitor apps within their technologies, but Riverbed is using REST APIs and its own data to provide visibility into apps, servers, and usage. It provides reports to IT managers to help them make policy decisions and monitor and troubleshoot performance issues across hybrid WANs, remote LANs, or cloud networks.

SteelConnect 2.0 that integrates SteelCentral is targeted to be available in October 2016.