Riverbed updated its SteelCentral application performance management (APM) platform to provide native visibility into containers running on Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. That platform is also core to Riverbed’s SD-WAN offering.

Amena Siddiqi, director of product marketing at Riverbed, said the company’s APM product provides full visibility into transactions, containers, and services running within those environments. This allows for companies to glean deeper application performance knowledge than what they can get from other platforms.

“This is about building a much easier workflow for the system administrator and providing more context into the orchestration layer,” Siddiqi said. She also touted the platform’s scalability, stating that some customers were running tens of thousands of agents through a single server.

“There has been a metrics explosion with Kubernetes, OpenStack, and OpenShift,” Siddiqi explained. “Our approach is more focused on what impacts performance and more importantly application performance.”

She said the platform updates have been driven by customers that are embracing the container roadmap but need visibility into those platforms in order to make sure applications are performing as needed.

“These technologies have been around for some time, but larger customers are coming to us and are building new applications or migrating their legacy applications into these cloud native environments and are asking for greater visibility,” Siddiqi said.

The biggest part of the project was aligning the platform with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF). Riverbed did not have a previous partnership with PCF, so it had to work around a few more hurdles than what was involved working with the open source Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms.

The SteelCentral platform also received an update to its AppResponse Cloud network performance monitoring (NPM) product that now collects and analyzes packet information for Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployments.

The broader update builds on Riverbed’s move in June to bolster the SteelCentral platform with new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and integration with the WiFi access points on its Xirrus platform.

New Relic, which also competes in the APM space, recently added Kubernetes monitoring integration and distributed tracing capabilities to its platform. This allows for the monitoring of applications in complex modern architectures, particularly microservices.

Dimensional Research released a report earlier this year that found more than 90 percent of enterprises are using or plan to use microservices. The report, which was commissioned by monitoring company LightStep, also noted that 73 percent of those surveyed said they found it harder to report problems with applications performance in a microservices environment.

The SteelCentral platform is also part of Riverbed’s SteelConnect SD-WAN product, which has been gaining market share. An IHS Markit report from earlier this year found that Riverbed had gained some revenue traction in the SD-WAN space.

“Riverbed is starting to get more traction with their strategy,” said IHS Markit analyst Cliff Grossner, referring to the fact that Riverbed started with WAN optimization and then tapped into SD-WAN. “Riverbed now has the large client base they can start to mine in a substantive way. We’ve seen Citrix do it and Silver Peak do it. There’s no reason Riverbed can’t do it.”