To address these challenges, Riverbed this week unveiled a new suite of AI-powered Observability innovations aimed at eliminating blind spots, streamlining operations, and improving how IT teams manage complexity at scale. One of the most significant advancements in this release is Riverbed IQ Assist—a Generative AI capability designed to transform how IT Ops teams resolve issues, improve visibility, and drive operational efficiency.

Why legacy tools fall short

Despite massive investments in monitoring and management tools, many IT Ops teams still rely on outdated systems that weren’t built for today’s hybrid, fast-moving environments. Here’s where they fall behind:

• Slow incident resolution: Data silos across tools delay troubleshooting and increase Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
• Knowledge gaps: Critical expertise is often locked within teams, making it difficult to apply past learnings to new problems.
• Scalability issues: Expanding IT environments push legacy monitoring tools to their limits.
• Alert fatigue: IT teams are flooded with alerts, making it tough to prioritize real threats.
• Security and compliance risks: A lack of timely security checks and software audits puts enterprises at risk of non-compliance and potential breaches.

To stay ahead, IT leaders need to move beyond reactive troubleshooting and toward a more proactive, AI-powered approach. That’s where Predictive AI and Generative AI (GenAI) come into play, and why Riverbed’s latest innovations are a timely and necessary step forward.

How Riverbed IQ Assist transforms IT Ops

Riverbed IQ Ops has already helped organizations automate and streamline IT management using AI/ML. Recently, Riverbed IQ Ops delivered Predictive AI to enable customers to forecast issues before they arise. Now, with the introduction of Riverbed IQ Assist—a GenAI-powered platform capability designed to revolutionize how IT teams resolve issues and engage with observability data—organizations can take a major step forward in proactive, AI-driven operations.

By embedding GenAI as a platform capability and integrating IQ Assist across its products, Riverbed doesn’t just analyze data—it enables smarter decision-making with AI built into everyday workflows. Here’s how:

AI-driven incident analysis and resolution

Forget traditional chatbots that require endless prompts. Riverbed IQ Assist instantly delivers clear, actionable insights, eliminating the back-and-forth and helping teams resolve issues faster.

Predictive and preventative maintenance

Stop reacting—start predicting. By analyzing historical observability data, Riverbed IQ Ops anticipates failures before they happen, enabling proactive maintenance through automated workflows and third-party integrations.

AI-powered root cause analysis

Finding the root cause of IT issues can take hours or sometimes days. Riverbed IQ Assist correlates data across multiple observability tools in seconds, delivering simple, AI-driven explanations that eliminate guesswork, and reduce the reliance on subject matter experts or war rooms for incident investigation and resolution.

Natural language insights for ITSM and decision-making

Complex graphs, reports, and analytics are no longer a barrier. Riverbed IQ Assist translates incidents, root causes, and recommended fixes into easy-to-understand human language, ensuring IT teams and business leaders can act fast. Integrated within Riverbed products such as Aternity, or with IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms, it helps resolve support tickets more accurately while fostering continuous learning for smarter operations.

Intelligent automation for faster remediation

Why just identify issues when you can automate the fix? Riverbed IQ Ops empowers teams to trigger remediations manually or set them to run autonomously, cutting downtime and boosting reliability. In this use case, Riverbed IQ Assist can also be embedded as a node in the automation workflow to provide GenAI functionality.

A competitive advantage for IT leaders

For organizations looking to reduce costs, improve agility, and scale smarter, AI-powered solutions like Riverbed IQ Ops deliver a clear strategic advantage. By embedding intelligence directly into IT workflows, these innovations shift operations from reactive to proactive—enabling teams to act faster, with greater confidence and less manual effort.

With Predictive AI, GenAI-powered insights, and intelligent automation, Riverbed empowers IT leaders to:

• Accelerate issue resolution through AI-driven automation
• Increase agility by reducing dependency on scarce expertise
• Proactively manage IT environments using predictive analytics
• Reduce alert fatigue with intelligent correlation and prioritization
• Strengthen compliance and security with AI-assisted risk detection

This combination of visibility, automation, and intelligence positions Riverbed customers to stay competitive in a fast-changing digital landscape, while improving service delivery and user experience.

The future of IT Ops: Autonomous and AI-driven

IT Ops is moving toward a future where AI autonomously detects, diagnoses, and resolves issues without human intervention. The Riverbed Platform, with enabling technologies like AI/ML analytics and correlation for Causal AI and Predictive AI, plus Riverbed IQ Assist for GenAI, is at the forefront of this shift, embedding AI comprehensively into IT workflows.

For IT leaders, the real question isn’t if you should adopt GenAI in IT Ops—it’s how soon you can implement it safely, securely, and accurately to stay ahead of business needs and your competition.

Are you ready to embrace the future of autonomous IT? Riverbed IQ Assist is your next step.

The challenges facing IT teams today

IT environments are more complex than ever, with growing demands on infrastructure, rising expectations for performance, and the constant evolution of digital technologies. Here are some of the key challenges that IT teams face:

• Data Availability and Quality: Predictive models depend on accurate, high-quality data. However, incomplete, inconsistent, or noisy data can lead to unreliable forecasts and decreased trust in AI systems.
• Model Complexity and Accuracy: Creating models capable of addressing modern IT environments’ complexity without overfitting or under-fitting is no small feat.
• Scalability: The sheer volume of data in large-scale IT environments requires a solution that scales effortlessly as the organization grows.
• Integration with Existing Systems: Predictive insights are only useful when seamlessly integrated into existing observability tools and workflows.
• Interpretability and Actionability: Complex outputs often require expert interpretation, making it critical to deliver predictions that IT teams can easily understand and act upon.

How Riverbed IQ Predictive AI solves these challenges

Our Predictive AI capabilities are designed to overcome these obstacles and empower IT teams to proactively manage their environments. Here’s how:

Reliable Data and Advanced Models

Riverbed IQ integrates high-fidelity data from its observability products to continuously monitor metrics and detect anomalies. It augments this with live data from third-party systems to operate on a rich ecosystem-wide dataset. Leveraging 15+ years of expertise in machine learning, our platform achieves unparalleled predictive accuracy, helping IT teams identify issues such as traffic spikes, performance degradation, or latency before they escalate.

Scalable Cloud-Native Architecture

Built on cloud-native principles, Riverbed IQ scales dynamically, handling growing data volumes without compromising performance. Our patented Data Store technology ensures essential data is prioritized, enabling efficient processing and analysis.

Proactive Performance Optimization

Predictive AI functionality highlights the likelihood and impact of potential outages, helping organizations preempt disruptions with targeted mitigation plans. Automated remediation workflows seamlessly integrate with third-party systems, eliminating manual intervention and accelerating resolution.

Intelligent Forecasting and Planning

By analyzing historical and current trends, Riverbed IQ provides actionable forecasts for resource utilization, enabling IT teams to optimize allocations and avoid bottlenecks. The product’s intuitive dashboards present forecasts in clear graphical and tabular formats, complete with training data transparency to build user confidence.

The benefits of Riverbed IQ Predictive AI

With this new capability, Riverbed IQ changes how IT teams approach performance monitoring and optimization. Key benefits include:

• Reduced Downtime: By addressing issues before they impact operations, predictive analytics minimize disruptions and ensure service continuity.
• Optimized Resource Utilization: Data-driven insights help prevent over-provisioning, reducing costs and improving efficiency.
• Enhanced User Experience: Proactive performance management ensures smoother digital experiences, boosting user satisfaction and loyalty.
• Strategic Decision-Making: Predictive analytics empower IT leaders with actionable insights, enabling smarter investments and long-term planning.

Ready to transform your IT operations?

Riverbed IQ is more than just a tool—it’s a comprehensive AIOps solution designed to help IT teams deliver exceptional digital experiences. By leveraging AI to turn data into foresight, we empower businesses to optimize resources, prevent disruptions, and stay ahead in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

The latest release continues Portal’s evolution by enhancing its capabilities to address the needs of today’s complex enterprise environments.

New features in Riverbed Portal 3.13

Expanded hypervisor support

Portal now supports deployment on ESXi 8.0, ensuring compatibility with VMware’s latest hypervisor platform. It also runs natively in Hyper-V environments, allowing administrators to deploy Portal without relying on additional hypervisors, thereby expanding virtualization options.

Improved manageability and administration

Riverbed has simplified administrative tasks by introducing several new features:

• Administrators can now multi-select thresholds for more efficient deletion.
• The Custom Dashboard Template Management view includes a version number field for better template tracking.
• A new report feature displays dashboard access and usage statistics over specified time frames.
• The Resource Management view now shows the number of streaming elements per dashboard, with color-coded indicators and sorting capabilities.
• Another column in the Resource Management view displays the data sources used by each dashboard, enabling administrators to filter and view specific sources.
• Enhanced database performance analysis now overcomes the limitations of previous drill-down options.

Simplified deployment

Riverbed has made Portal easier to deploy by making it available on Azure Marketplace. Administrators can now adjust memory settings during the backup and restore process, streamlining the transition between servers or environments. New REST APIs simplify the scripting of updates and the distribution of Host Groups through Portal Central Manager. Additionally, Riverbed has improved integration between NETIM GMC Metrics and Portal by adding a searchable filter to the metrics display, eliminating the need to repeatedly click “show more” when managing large numbers of metrics.

Enhanced compliance

Portal now supports IPv6 compliance, building upon the approach taken by the NPM platform (AR11), and ensuring compatibility with the increasing usage of IPv6 networks.

This release equips Riverbed Portal to address the complex demands of modern, fully virtualized network environments. By delivering enhanced virtualization support, simplified management functionality, and streamlined deployment options, it meets the current needs of IT operations teams while anticipating future industry requirements.

Application/Location Roll-up 

The latest enhancements to Riverbed IQ include a new set of Application Roll-up Incident Types which have been introduced to better correlate Application-anomalies into those that represent a single Application that is experiencing issues across multiple Locations, and those that represent multiple Applications experiencing issues at a particular Location.

Prior to this new Incident Type, multiple anomalies associated with a specific Application spread across multiple Locations or, multiple Applications concentrated onto a single Location would be surfaced as multiple “Application Location Issue” Incidents. This new Incident Type now condenses things into a single “Application – Multi-Location Issue” incident significantly reducing the number of incidents that are raised for automation/remediation or additional investigation by IT staff. 

Incident Timeline 

The Incident Timeline replaces the Incident Source area in the IQ dashboard and provides a chronological view of the full Incident lifecycle, i.e. highlighting when indicators were detected/correlated, runbook automations were executed and capturing other related events.

Prior to this new Incident Timeline, users could only see Indicator-detail associated with the Incident. Now, users can see much more detail in a timeline-view of events associated with an Incident. This simplifies troubleshooting and enables IT teams to quickly understand details of an incident without needing multiple tools to stitch together this view.

Automation path traversal 

Automation workflows can be complex, and it may not always be obvious to a user what actions were taken by the automation flow as it processed a detected anomaly. Showing the actual path taken through the flow allows the user to understand what actions the automation flow has taken after execution of that automation.

For example, while investigating an incident, a user needs to know more contextual detail around why the analysis contains certain data/visualizations and not others or has taken certain remediation actions. By looking at the executed path through the automation flow, the user is provided the details and explanation necessary to understand the outcome of the automation.

Explainable and simple AI 

One of the challenges with AI-driven systems is the impression they leave on the user of “black-box” or “magical” properties that are complex to understand and master. Riverbed IQ has very intentionally taken the approach of ensuring that all its AI/ML is simple to understand and explain. The features discussed in this series of blogs deliver on that intent. 

This four-part series has taken us through the vast new capabilities of Riverbed IQ, from its advanced data science tools to its enhanced automation workflows and the game-changing integrations that tie everything together. The future of IT automation is bright, and Riverbed IQ is at the forefront—leading the charge in building a unified, intelligent IT ecosystem. These innovations empower IT teams to work more efficiently, reduce manual tasks, and make smarter decisions by using real-time data from across the enterprise, with simple, explainable AI that works.

Thank you for following along—now it’s time to explore these features and see how they can transform your own IT operations! Contact your account manager to set up a demo today!

Integrations Library 

With over 35 pre-built connectors, adapters, and integrations, Riverbed IQ simplifies and accelerates the connection between its platform and popular third-party tools such as ServiceNow, Splunk, Microsoft Azure, AWS, AppDynamics, and Datadog. These integrations take the complexity out of connecting diverse data sources, giving IT teams instant access to enhanced visibility, diagnostics, and automation within IQ workflows. By simply installing an integration subflow, the associated capabilities become available for use in Automation workflows, reducing the need for custom coding or extensive setup. 

The Integration Library provides seamless interoperability, allowing IT teams to quickly pull external data into Riverbed IQ for faster decision-making and streamlined troubleshooting. Whether it’s an issue detected by Riverbed’s monitoring tool automatically generating a ServiceNow ticket, or triggering a notification in Slack, these integrations boost operational efficiency.

And for teams with unique requirements, the customizable connectors in the library enable you to tailor integrations to meet specific business needs. This means Riverbed IQ isn’t limited to standard tools—it can be adapted to integrate with virtually any platform, driving deeper automation and broader data integration. 

Figure 1. The new Integrations Library makes it easy to add outside data into Riverbed IQ or export actionable insights to other solutions. 

As part of its relentless drive to streamline and expand automation capabilities, Riverbed IQ has rolled out several powerful features to support its Integration Library. These updates—JSON as a subflow input, OAuth parameters for secure authentication, and auto-insert Liquid template variables—allow IT teams to elevate their workflows, integrate with external systems, and improve the security of their operations.

JSON support

Support for JSON as a subflow input allows users to integrate external systems and services by enabling HTTP requests within automation workflows. As JSON is a lightweight, widely used data format for transmitting structured data, this capability makes it easier for IQ to ingest input from various APIs, cloud services, or third-party tools. By configuring HTTP requests that deliver JSON payloads as subflow inputs, organizations can dynamically feed data into workflows, triggering automated actions such as gathering diagnostics data. This flexible approach enhances interoperability and streamlines integration, allowing IT teams to create more adaptable, data-driven automation strategies within Riverbed IQ’s ecosystem. 

OAuth parameters

OAuth parameters are a way to provide secure, flexible, and streamlined authentication for connecting to external services and APIs, in this case, for integrations with third-party platforms. OAuth (Open Authorization) is a widely used protocol that allows applications to access resources on behalf of a user without exposing credentials like usernames or passwords. By supporting OAuth, Riverbed IQ ensures secure, token-based authentication when interacting with other systems. 

Liquid template auto-insert variables

Auto-insert variables are dynamic placeholders that can be used within Liquid templates to automatically insert real-time data into workflows, reports, or notifications. These variables allow users to customize outputs by pulling relevant information from within the Riverbed IQ or third-party environments, without manual input.

Some sample use cases include: 

• Incident Information: Automatically insert data like {{ incident.id }} or {{ incident.severity }} to provide full incident context. 
• Time and Date: Ensure your workflows are time-stamped with real-time data, using variables like {{ incident.timestamp }}. 
• Affected Systems: Display which services or devices were affected by pulling data directly into templates using {{ incident.affected_services }}. 

API endpoint for incident generation from external source

The API endpoint for incident generation from external sources allows third-party systems to send data to create incidents within the Riverbed IQ platform. This API endpoint is designed to accept data about incidents, including details such as the type of issue, affected systems, and severity, to automatically generate and manage incidents. 

A unified, automation-driven IT ecosystem 

The culmination of these enhancements positions Riverbed IQ as a critical tool for organizations looking to analyze, automate, integrate, and optimize their IT environments. The Integrations Library, combined with JSON support, OAuth authentication, and Liquid templates, creates a robust foundation for building dynamic, secure, and scalable workflows that integrate seamlessly with a wide variety of external systems. As IT organizations increase the implementation and usage of automation to simplify the task of managing increasingly complex networks and enabling resolution of issues at lower levels of the organization, Riverbed IQ’s automation serves as the essential glue in this strategic initiative.

With the introduction of on-demand and scheduled automation workflows that supplement triggered automations, plus subflow versioning, global scoped variables, and automated data imports, Riverbed IQ provides IT teams with the agility and precision needed to tackle both expected and unexpected issues. These enhancements offer flexibility, scalability, and reliability, ensuring smoother, more efficient operations. In this blog, we’ll dive into how these features are transforming IT infrastructure management and making automation more accessible and impactful than ever. 

On-demand automations 

The new on-demand automations functionality brings dynamic, user-driven automation to IT operations, allowing teams to instantly execute predefined troubleshooting and diagnostic processes. Designed to automate complex and repetitive tasks, these automations enable real-time data collection, analysis, and remediation without the need for manual intervention. Unlike scheduled automations, on-demand automations can be triggered at will, offering unparalleled flexibility to address specific issues as they arise. This capability dramatically enhances operational agility and helps teams swiftly resolve performance bottlenecks, outages, or anomalies, ultimately reducing downtime and improving overall efficiency. 

Scheduled automations 

In addition to on-demand capabilities, Riverbed IQ now supports the scheduling of automations for unattended execution. Scheduled automations allow IT teams to plan routine tasks—such as network performance monitoring, application latency checks, and issue remediation—at specified times or on a recurring basis. By proactively managing these tasks, organizations can catch potential issues early, improve performance, and reduce the burden on IT staff. The new Automation Scheduling page simplifies the process, enabling teams to configure and manage their scheduled workflows with ease, ensuring continuous oversight of critical infrastructure. 

Subflow versioning 

Subflows, modular components within automation workflows, provide a flexible and scalable solution for automating IT processes. These reusable sections of a larger workflow allow for the efficient execution of common tasks, such as gathering data or running diagnostics, without the need for re-creation. With the introduction of versioning, Riverbed IQ takes subflows to the next level by enabling teams to track, manage, and roll back changes to automation components over time. This added layer of control makes subflows more reliable and adaptable, ensuring smoother, safer automation across workflows. 

Test automations with automated data import

Riverbed IQ’s test automation with automated data import feature makes it easier to validate automation workflows before deploying them in live environments. By pre-loading relevant data, metrics, or logs into a test environment, IT teams can ensure that automations perform as expected in real-world scenarios. This reduces the risk of errors, streamlines the development process, and ensures workflows are perfected before being applied to critical systems. With this feature, Riverbed IQ enables IT teams to fine-tune their automations with greater confidence and accuracy. 

Global Scoped Variables  

Global Scoped Variables streamline and standardize automation workflows across different environments by offering a centralized way to manage commonly referenced values like IP addresses, thresholds, and authentication credentials. These globally defined variables can be used across multiple automations, ending the need for redefinition in each workflow. This not only improves efficiency by allowing updates in one place to propagate across all workflows but also reduces errors and ensures consistent automation logic. Whether handling performance monitoring, network diagnostics, or troubleshooting, Global Scoped Variables enhance reliability and adaptability in IT operations. 

Drive efficiency and agility with Riverbed IQ automations

With these exciting automation enhancements, Riverbed IQ is revolutionizing how IT teams manage their IT environment. The flexibility of on-demand automations, combined with the precision of scheduled workflows, subflow versioning, global scoped variables, and automated data imports, empowers organizations to take their automation capabilities to the next level. By reducing manual intervention and improving operational agility, Riverbed IQ enables teams to focus on higher-level strategies that drive innovation and growth. 

Stay tuned for Part 3, where we’ll explore the highly anticipated Integration Library and added usability improvements that make Riverbed IQ even more powerful and user-friendly. The journey to smarter IT automation continues!

In this first part, we’ll explore the groundbreaking data science enhancements that are redefining how organizations choose, manage, and analyze their data sources. Part 2 will focus on features like on-demand and scheduled automations, Subflow versioning, and global variables, which provide a significant boost to automation capabilities. In Part 3, we’ll dive into the Integration Library and other enhancements, and in Part 4, we’ll explore the latest advancements in Analytics and Automation UI/UX.

Let’s begin with the innovations in data science that are transforming the management of complex IT environments.

Query specific data sources from automation Vantage Points

Vantage Points are a standout feature that allow Riverbed IQ users to prioritize and query specific data sources directly from automations. By choosing Vantage Points as strategic data collection locations, teams gain enhanced visibility and control over complex IT environments. These vantage points enable IQ automations to trigger queries based on pre-defined conditions or inputs, gathering real-time insights from various sources like Riverbed AppResponse. This ability to streamline data collection and analysis improves troubleshooting, reduces manual intervention, and accelerates time-to-resolution, dramatically improving operational efficiency.

App-Location preference

With the App-Location preference feature, users can choose their preferred data source within Riverbed IQ based on operational needs – currently, between AppResponse and NetProfiler. This feature lets customers dynamically decide which data source informs which decisions, ensuring teams access the most relevant insights for each use case. AppResponse specializes in detailed application analytics, while NetProfiler focuses on flow data for broader network performance. By setting preferences, Riverbed IQ dynamically taps into the most effective tool for each situation, enhancing monitoring accuracy and performance optimization.

N of M / Global Thresholds configuration for causal and predictive AI

The N of M / Global Thresholds configuration empowers users to manage how indicators are generated using Riverbed IQ’s causal and predictive AI capabilities. With the “N of M” approach, the system triggers alerts only when a specified number of thresholds are breached, minimizing false positives and ensuring that only critical anomalies are flagged. Users further enhance this capability through Global Thresholds, which centralizes the management and customization of thresholds across diverse metrics, services, and network environments. Together, these configurations enable users to make Riverbed IQ’s AI-driven insights more precise, contextual, and actionable for proactive issue management.

Analytics & Threshold configuration

Riverbed IQ’s new Analytics & Threshold configuration page gives users even more visibility into the data analytics pipeline, offering the ability to manage key measurements—devices, interfaces, applications—and tailor threshold configurations. Users can enable or disable processing on specific measurements and fine-tune thresholds to better fit their unique environments. By giving IT the ability to refine analytics configurations, Riverbed IQ ensures more accurate anomaly detection and performance management, empowering organizations to tailor insights and automations to their specific operational needs.

Setting the stage for smarter data management

The data science enhancements in Riverbed IQ mark a significant leap forward in how organizations can manage and refine their data for AI-driven analysis. From the flexibility to query specific data sources via Vantage Points to the powerful configuration of AI thresholds, these updates make it easier than ever to reduce false positives and gain actionable insights from complex environments.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll explore the automation enhancements that are set to further transform IT operations. The future of smarter, more efficient AI-driven automation is here, and Riverbed IQ is leading the way!