Cascade Profiler

Cascade® Profiler® is the centralized analysis and reporting console for the Cascade family. It utilizes network flow data (NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, IPFIX and other popular flow statistics), and complements it with packet-based performance metrics, to proactively monitor and troubleshoot application and network performance. Cascade Profiler can also be used for automated discovery and dependency mapping, to plan and validate for WAN optimization and QoS policies, and network security monitoring and forensics and to assure a consistent and reliable user experience.

Some of the capabilities that set Cascade Profiler apart from the competition include:

Service Monitoring – Cascade Profiler service dashboards provide a quick view into the end-to-end health of a business service. Application services are created using a discovery wizard, which automates the process of mapping transactions to its underlying infrastructure, ensuring service definitions are always accurate and up to date.  Red-yellow-green health status indicators are driven by Cascade Profiler’s advanced analytics, which automatically detect and alert on meaningful changes in performance, providing proactive notification of brewing issues. 

Automated Analytics – Cascade's advanced behavioral analytics are both mature and feature rich – they've been a stable part of the product since day one. Cascade Profiler tracks dozens of performance metrics, building and updating a historical baseline and alerting the administrator upon meaningful change, often before the user calls the help desk.

Discovery and Dependency Mapping – Automating the process of mapping transactions and applications to the underlying infrastructure and application interdependencies – including discovering through F5, Riverbed Stingray™ Traffic Manager and other application delivery controllers (ADCs) – is an essential component of the Cascade solution. The service models created become the basis of service dashboards and are invaluable tools for accelerating troubleshooting across complex application ecosystems, and planning for data center consolidation or cloud, disaster recovery and virtualization initiatives.

Cascade's automated discovery capabilities mitigate the risks due to infrastructure change, reduce the cost of downtime by accelerating network and application troubleshooting, and reduce operational costs by saving time and money during the discovery phase of IT projects and by realizing project benefits sooner.

Integrated PacketFlow (iP/F) – Cascade is the only network performance management solution to combine flow data and packet data into a single logical record. iP/F is the secret sauce that enables broad visibility with minimal instrumentation as well as the seamless transition between flow-based information in Cascade Profiler and packet-level information in Cascade Shark, reducing the time it takes to identify, diagnose and resolve complex performance issues. The advantage of this better architecture is that it provides greater visibility and management at a significantly better price, both capex and opex.

Integration with Steelhead appliances – Every Steelhead can act as a Cascade probe. In addition, Cascade provides robust analysis of optimized WAN environments and quality of service (QoS) settings enabling network managers to easily plan for WAN optimization, assess the impact of the deployment, and quantify benefits.

Cascade Profiler provides end-to-end visibility into network and application performance to enable IT organizations to assure a consistent and reliable experience to all users, regardless of where they sit in the enterprise. Riverbed Cascade provides the following capabilities:

• Visibility everywhere: from the branch LAN, across the WAN, and deep into the datacenter – across physical, virtual and load balanced environments
• Service-level dashboards that organize performance data by application and location to align awareness, visibility, and actions to business priorities
• Mature behavioral analytics that monitor performance metrics to uncover abnormal patterns of activity, providing early warning of problematic trends and enabling a more proactive IT operations 
• True enterprise-class flow monitoring (NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, IPFIX, etc.) tightly integrated with world-class packet capture and packet analysis
• Discovery wizard that automates the process of discovery and dependency mapping for building the Service Maps and Service Dashboards needed for an accurate and up-to-date understanding of application flows and their dependencies
• Layer 7 application and network behavior monitoring, including conversations, user connections, and bandwidth utilization
• Response time analysis and latency metrics provide granular understanding of application behavior and user experience
• VoIP quality monitoring and reporting on jitter, packet loss, MOS and R-Factor for H.323, SIP and Cisco SCCP (“Skinny”) signaling protocols
• Simple yet powerful, top-down workflow paradigm that accelerates and streamlines the isolation and diagnosis of performance issues
• Monitoring and reporting of optimized and non-optimized environments, which enables network managers to plan for WAN optimization, assess the impact of the deployment, and quantify benefits
• Highly flexible on-demand and scheduled reporting facilitates effective communications with management and colleagues
• iPad, iTouch and Android ready. View dashboards, analysis views and report on mobile devices and tablets for anywhere, anytime access
• Supports iPad, iTouch and Android. View dashboards, analysis views and report on mobile devices and tablets for anywhere, anytime access.

Service dashboards provide an at-a-glance view into the health of an application or location. This service health by location dashboard shows the status of each location. Expanding a location shows that the color-coding scheme is based on changes in user experience, efficiency and connectivity.

Service maps are generated automatically using the automated service discovery wizard. They are instrumental in pinpointing where in the network issues are occurring and are an invaluable IT planning tool for mitigating risk due to consolidation, cloud, virtualization, and disaster recovery initiatives. Cascade is unique in its ability to automatically discover across F5 LTM and Riverbed Stingray ADCs for no loss of visibility in load-balanced environments.

Mature behavioral analytics monitor performance metrics to uncover abnormal patterns of activity, providing early warning of problematic trends and enabling IT operations to become more proactive. Cascade provides transparency in its analytics. In this alert, the blue line represents the current response time activity, the green band show typical historical ranges of normal responsiveness, and the pink column shows the event trigger where current activity exceeded normal expectations.

Cascade Profile is flexible on-demand and scheduled reporting facilitates incident reporting with management and colleagues. View dashboards, analysis views and report on iPad, iTouch and Android devices for anywhere, anytime access.