Network Performance Management

"Riverbed Cascade has given us the end-to-end application visibility not found in our existing tools. I use Cascade frequently to identify and resolve performance and availability issues for infrastructure management and business-critical applications."
— Neil Wasserman, VP of IT, DTCC

As organizations consolidate their IT environments through cloud computing, server virtualization and data center consolidation, they're moving users further away from their applications. This can result in slower performance, increased bandwidth costs, and new security risks. Unfortunately, most companies find it difficult to assess these risks and adapt their infrastructure accordingly.

Riverbed Technology gives you a complete solution to optimize your network and gain visibility into your top network challenges. During WAN optimization projects, you can analyze what's on the network to discover optimization candidates, quantify optimization benefits, size your deployment of Steelhead® appliances from Riverbed®, and plan for future growth.

For application performance management, Cascade monitors applications and uses behavioral analytics to alert you when there are changes from normal behavior. For IT consolidation projects, you can use Cascade to expedite the discovery and dependency mapping phase. Cascade finds which applications are running on your network, who's using them, and which devices are used to deliver each application, so you can minimize risks during a data center change.

Cascade comprehensive solution:

• Provides a fully integrated network monitoring and acceleration solution
• Discovers servers, network paths, applications, and users across the IT infrastructure and analyzes dependencies
• Identifies assets and applications, understands usage, identifies bandwidth utilization by application, and forecasts capacity needs
• Provides business-level information to help you avoid costly security and performance events
• Reports on application response time and network latency across optimized and non-optimized environments

Related Content

• Register to read NetForecast: Adding Visibility to WAN Optimization »
• Register to read NetForecast: Managing Application Performance in the Cloud »

"After evaluating solutions from several vendors, we decided that Riverbed offered a product that could provide us with a clear and immediate picture of activity on our internal network and grant us the ability to respond efficiently and effectively to internal threats."
— David Olbrys, Global Infrastructure Security Coordinator, Cabot

We realize your business has to run at optimal speed now and in the future. You need visibility into your IT infrastructure when applications slow down, when end-users experience performance problems, and when unauthorized applications or malware create performance and security issues. Cascade can help your business solve operational problems that impact employee productivity.

Cascade proactively monitors application and network performance from the end-user perspective. It finds out if application and network problems are slowing users down anywhere on your network, including remote offices optimized with Riverbed Steelhead appliances. It monitors the infrastructure transparently, without the need for expensive new hardware or application modifications.

If you are consolidating data centers or moving to cloud-based solutions, Riverbed can also help. Cascade has embedded discovery and dependency mapping capabilities, and can discover applications, servers, and users throughout your network in a matter of hours. You get consolidation benefits faster and reduce the risk of outages.

Learn more about Cascade Solution

Accelerate Network Performance

Optimize the network thoroughly with every application, user, and device. Make better business decisions that save money and resources.

• Understand what performance level users are experiencing, and whether service-level agreements are being met
• Reduce help desk costs by identifying and resolving problems faster
• See which applications or users are slowing down the network
• Forecast WAN optimization and bandwidth capacity needs
• Accelerate discovery and dependency mapping using Cascade's unique end-to-end view of the application delivery path, to save time and money during IT consolidation projects

Minimize Business Service Outages With Network Troubleshooting

Cascade detects service disruptions early, so you can reduce risk and get back up and running more quickly.

• Monitor end-user activity and provide alerts to IT before users call to complain
• Get consistent metrics for all environments — optimized or not. Reduce the time required to restore disrupted services and minimize the operating cost.
• Reduce the number of service-affecting incidents, and maximize service income
• Reduce revenue loss from business service disruptions. Cascade's unique end-to-end view of the application delivery path helps IT understand the relationships between applications, networks, and servers.

Cut Costs & Realize ROI

Target investments that actually cut costs.

• Prioritize applications that would most benefit from optimization, so you can focus capital expenditures for best results
• Avoid costly bandwidth upgrades, by using Cascade for assessment and Steelhead for acceleration
• Identify and minimize non-business use of expensive WAN resources
• Reduce capital expenditures required to reach full application deployment
• Realize ROI on cost-cutting projects including WAN optimization, private and public clouds, server virtualization, and disaster recovery

Related Content

• Read Fast Facts: 10 Reasons You Need Network and Application Visibility »
• Register to read NetForecast: Adding Visibility to WAN Optimization »
• Register to read NetForecast: Managing Application Performance in the Cloud »

"The GUI is the best GUI I’ve seen in my life...the ease of immediate use is beyond description."
— Carl Cammarata, CISO, CUNY

We know expectations from network teams are growing. You need to monitor and predict application performance, maintain service level agreements, prevent security breaches, and monitor external service providers.

However, when network management toolsets become outdated and expensive to maintain, they don’t provide a full picture of the modern IT environment, so visibility into your infrastructure can become a challenge.

Cascade takes the concept of network optimization to the next level, allowing you to constantly assess, accelerate, and adapt your IT infrastructure. It’s useful for keeping critical applications running at top speed, identifying unauthorized systems on the network, and identifying underutilized servers that can be consolidated or eliminated.

Cascade collects and analyzes vast amounts of network flow data and enhances it with application and user identification. Deploying Cascade is easy and cost-effective. It won’t require significant capital and operational expenditures to install and maintain. The GUI allows you to drill down to WAN and LAN information at any level and offers a wide variety of metrics and reports. With Cascade, you can stop infrastructure problems in their tracks and help the business avoid revenue loss.

Learn more about Cascade Solution

Run An Efficient Infrastructure

Manage change in the IT infrastructure to ensure the availability, performance, and security of business services. Reduce costs and satisfy regulatory requirements.

• Manage application performance — Proactively assure service delivery with Cascade's behavioral analytics, which alert you to performance problems faster than the end-user can
• Drill into network information with a full set of application-centric, site-centric, and business-centric views
• Get visibility into WAN and virtualized environments — Get full visibility into traditionally "blind" environments such as optimized WANs and virtualized systems
• Automated regulatory compliance — Use reporting capabilities to support automated planning and policy enforcement and reduce the effort and cost required to support audits
• Consolidate data center — Application discovery and dependency mapping provides the information needed for proper planning. Change impact information ensures smooth implementation.
• Improve security — Identify hard to detect security threats such as zero-day attacks, "boutique" malware, and credentialed attacks

Solve Infrastructure Problems Faster

Cascade detects service disruptions early through behavioral analytics. Reduce risk, resolve disruptions quickly, and save money.

• Get reports on application response time, throughput, and other metrics across optimized and non-optimized environments
• Reduce the number of service-affecting incidents, and maximize service income
• Reduce revenue loss from business service disruptions. Cascade's unique end-to-end view of the application delivery path helps IT understand the relationships between applications, networks, and servers.
• Define service-level objectives, monitor for service-level changes, and enforce usage policies with Cascade

Achieve Cost Savings

Avoid disruptions, avoid bandwidth upgrades, and reduce overall operational expenses.

• Significantly reduce capital expenditures required to reach full deployment. Install Cascade with minimal deployment of devices such as IDS sensors or network probes. The model scales by the number of data centers, rather than the number of WAN links or remote sites.
• Reduce the overall operational expense of network, application, and security management processes
• Immediately identify internal or credentialed attacks, unauthorized applications, hosts, or servers on the network with automated alerts
• Avoid costly bandwidth upgrades, by using Cascade for assessment and Steelhead for acceleration
• Identify and minimize non-business use of expensive WAN resources

Related Content

• Read Fast Facts: 10 Reasons You Need Network and Application Visibility »
• Register to read NetForecast: Adding Visibility to WAN Optimization »
• Register to read NetForecast: Managing Application Performance in the Cloud »

Network defenses such as intrusion detection / prevention systems (IDS/IPS), firewalls, and antivirus are critical first measures of defense, but have limitations that prevent complete protection of enterprise networks. These tried and true security solutions

• Fail to defend against advanced persistent threats (APTs),  internally instigated or credentialed attacks, or zero-day threats; 
• Add expense and management complexity, especially in highly meshed (MPLS), 10gig and virtualized networks;
• Can introduce performance bottlenecks and points of failure into the very networks they are trying to secure.

Riverbed Cascade is a next-generation monitoring platform that provides enterprises a pervasive view of all activity on the network.  With Cascade, information security teams can address a broad range of security and governance challenges, including targeted malware, APTs, fraud, espionage and forensic audits.

Utilizing network flow data from routers and switches, as well as packet data collected from network SPANs, Cascade provides real-time, enterprise-wide network visibility, context, and control that enables network and security operations manager to

• Identify threats typically missed by traditional perimeter-based solutions
• Accelerate assessment and remediation of security and compliance issues
• Identify what is and is not in scope from a regulatory perspective
• Maintain a forensic trail for incident post-mortems and audits

In addition, Cascade supports bi-directional integration with several different layers of network and security infrastructure.  Through the sharing of intelligence and control with other products on the network, Cascade enables greater situational awareness, faster threat detection, more comprehensive incident response and triage, and better understanding of the event’s impact on the network as well as the business. Currently Cascade has documented workflows integrating with security event managers (SEMs), routers and switches, vulnerability scanners, IPS, NAC, DNS/DHCP and Active Directory, as well as a robust API for additional use cases. 

For more information on Cascade’s security monitoring capabilities, please download our solutions brief Security for the Borderless Era.

Riverbed® Cascade® is an application-aware network performance management solution with easy-to-use, wizard-based discovery and dependency capabilities that automate the process of mapping transactions and applications to the underlying infrastructure and application interdependencies. Cascade passively analyzes historical and real-time network traffic behavior to quickly provide information about the interactions, usage and dependencies between users, applications, and servers – without the need for agents or scans.  This information is used within Cascade to build detailed and accurate service dashboards and service maps that provide an end-to-end view of service health.

Mitigating Risks Due to IT Change

Cascade’s service maps are also invaluable tools for accelerating the planning and reducing the risk of many IT change projects, including:

• Data center consolidations
• Cloud, and virtualization projects
• Disaster recovery 
• Regulatory and security compliance
• Supporting CMDB initiatives

As a result, customers who use Cascade’s discovery and dependency mapping capabilities see the following benefit:

• Project times are shortened by 66%
• The expense of discovery is reduced by up to half
• Project benefits, such as cost reductions, efficiencies, etc., are realized sooner

For more information on Cascade’s discovery and dependency mapping capabilities, please download our white paper, Mitigating the Risks of IT Change.