Enter Riverbed Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk—a game-changer designed to propel your IT Service Desk into a new world of:

• Significantly Reduced IT Costs
• Lower Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
• Enhanced IT Productivity
• Streamlined Automated Remediation

The cornerstone of Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk is its ability to trigger low-code runbooks upon any alert. These runbooks, with their drag-and-drop interface, allow for the definition of troubleshooting logic through nodes packed with pre-built code, enabling you to:

• Navigate complex decision paths effortlessly.
• Make external calls for swift remediation actions.
• Retrieve third-party data seamlessly.

Let’s delve into a couple of real examples which showcase what this new capability can help your teams achieve.

Remedy low disk space

As trivial as it sounds, running low on disk space can be quite debilitating and drastically affect end-user productivity, comparable to the frustration of slow boot times. In the runbook shown below, each of the colorful nodes contain pre-defined code for various functions such as making external API calls, decision logic, visualization and more—and it works like a flow chart.

Once an alert triggers this runbook, execution starts. Next it does the obvious: promptly identifies potential space savings by clearing the usual suspects like temporary files and emptying the recycle bin. If that gives back substantial free space, then the lower path from the decision branch executes the remediation logic through a web call and displays the result as part of the runbook output. Conversely, if the initial cleanup does not free enough space and manual investigation is needed, the runbook calls an API to list the top few files and folders by size from the device (via the Aternity REST API), automatically generates a ServiceNow incident, and provides the top files and folders by size in the incident description. That way, when the technician looks at it, the next steps become obvious.

Resolve application startup problems

Consider the case with CAD applications, where large files frequently move between the user’s device and a SaaS back-end, posing unique challenges. Here is an example from an actual scenario faced by one of our customers experiencing frequent a flood of issues with the CAD native Windows application hanging and abruptly crashing.

This runbook springs into action upon detecting an application crash event in the user’s Windows event log. Upon executing, the runbook first tries to look for file timeouts (obtained via call to Aternity API). If it sees timeouts, it runs a traceroute to typical destinations for the SaaS backend hosts and conducts a speed test to check whether the user’s bandwidth could be a culprit.

With conclusive evidence of timeouts, the runbook compiles the results from traceroute, speed test, and file timeouts into a ServiceNow incident for further action. If no timeouts are detected, the runbook can send a notification to the user (similar to below) to ask their permission to automatically open a ticket on their behalf.

Empower your IT Service Desk

Gone are the days of manual troubleshooting, triaging, and remedying every service desk ticket. With the power of Riverbed Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk, innovative low-code runbooks take on the tedious work of triage and troubleshooting, delivering insightful results. To explore more about how the Intelligent Service Desk can transform your IT operations, please visit our website.

RiverbedUnified Observability portfolio is ready to tackle the energy efficiency and sustainability demands of modern businesses. With its focus on Sustainable IT, the Riverbed portfolio aims to support energy-conscious practices and meet the energy reporting requirements worldwide.

Sustainability consciousness is on the rise

In an era of heightened environmental consciousness, corporations face increasing pressure to decrease their carbon footprint and adhere to sustainability regulations like the European Green Deal and the international Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol.

In early September 2023, the state of California introduced landmark legislation, SB 253, which mandates environmentally conscious disclosure obligations for thousands of U.S. public and private companies. The EU had already announced similar requirements as part of their CSR Directive in early January 2023.

With growing adoption of these disclosure laws worldwide, Riverbed Aternity’s Sustainable IT dashboards have been developed with flexible configuration and customization to be adaptable to local needs. Watch this video to see how Aternity provides your IT teams with the full suite of tools to tackle Sustainable IT requirements and practices:

How Riverbed Aternity’s energy efficiency solution helps

Aternity equips your IT teams with a comprehensive suite of tools to address Sustainable IT requirements and best practices. This includes out-of-the-box dashboards that compile essential energy data, automation workflows, built-in surveys, and notifications for end-users.

Riverbed Aternity has introduced a new “Sustainability” category of dashboards, with regular additions of new  “Sustainability” dashboards as they become available.

Now, let’s explore an example “Energy Efficiency” dashboard of a company with a global workforce, including remote employees. This dashboard vividly illustrates how seemingly innocuous power settings on Windows laptops can significantly impact power consumption across the board. It also provides a clear understanding of the nuanced details of the energy demands of user equipment.

Looking at all the user devices in this company collectively, it’s apparent that around 46% of the time in a month, the devices consume power despite users not actively interacting with them. Aternity refers to this time as “Inactive.”

Let’s delve into how this 46% “Inactive” time was calculated:

An hour of uptime is considered “Inactive” when no keystrokes or mouse movements are detected by Aternity, and the screen or monitor is either in sleep mode or locked while consuming full power. However, if there is any keyboard or mouse activity, that hour counts as “Active.” As the calculation of idle time is very conservative, there could easily be a lot more power wastage occurring.  In some tools, the “Inactive” time is also called “Idle Time.”

Optimize energy conservation with Balanced Power Plan

Looking into the details of Windows devices, especially those using the “Balanced Power Plan,” a Windows out-of-the-box setting for reducing power consumption, it’s evident that collectively, almost 53% of the time, these devices remain idle while still consuming power. In fact, the percentage of time these devices were “Inactive” is even higher for devices using the “Balanced Power Plan.”

In summary, “Inactive” time closely relates to what would traditionally be perceived as “Idle Time” for these end-user devices. Fine-tuning the device power plans could result in saving kilowatt-hours of electricity by suspending or shutting them down when they are “Inactive.” However, are they genuinely doing nothing?

Collect information with Sentiment Surveys 

There may be legitimate cases where long idle times are expected.

Aternity’s Sentiment Surveys are seamlessly integrated into the product, offering an effective way to survey a selective group of users or the entire digital estate from within the product. These surveys help administrators combine survey data with energy efficiency, Sustainable IT data, or performance data collected by Aternity to provide a comprehensive view of which areas of their digital estate need attention. Aternity offers a range of out-of-the-box survey templates, and users can also create their own from scratch.

These sentiment survey templates raise awareness, understand employee behavior, and drive cultural change.

Take action with remediation scripts

Once insights are gleaned from Aternity dashboards, Aternity provides remediation scripts and end-user notifications to implement configuration changes, such as updating the Windows registry or customizing a device power plan. Aternity also informs end-users of this activity through notifications. There are various out-of-the-box remediation scripts available, and administrators can create custom scripts from scratch if needed.

Learn more

Riverbed recognizes the growing need for sustainability in IT worldwide. Riverbed Aternity empowers customers to achieve their sustainability goals by offering curated energy-focused dashboards and user-conscious workflows, including automated remediation, to take control of energy expenditure. To learn more about how Riverbed can assist with Sustainable IT, please visit Riverbed’s Sustainable IT page.

Upon successful exploitation of this vulnerability, an attacker could gain sufficient access to install a web shell inside the MOVEit application. This would allow the bad actor full access to read, write and delete contents of the various databases it utilizes, such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Azure SQL. Multiple vendors have published details about the attack vector, revealing a consistent pattern of attempting to infiltrate the vulnerable system via SQL injection to implant the web shell.

Read on to discover three ways Riverbed can help safeguard your organization from potential breaches.

1. Uncover historical activity

If you have unknowingly been scanned or implanted with this web shell, it is important to note that these attackers have been known to use a range of IP addresses. This range is released with the CVE Indicators of Notice. Thanks to Riverbed NetProfiler‘s high-resolution, raw-flow retention that comfortably goes back multiple years, the search through history to investigate any traces of offending IP addresses is made simple.

Simply copy and paste these IPs, set your desired time range, and then see whether there has been any activity from these IP addresses in the past.

NetProfiler then provides detailed, highly-customizable interactive reports, such as report shown below, on the various TCP or UDP communication these IPs have been engaging. In easy to understand tables, it provides port number and traffic volumes.

2. Visualize relationships between IP addresses

Visualizing the relationships of IP end points will usually bring out hidden trends and patterns in the attack vector that may not be as easily apparent in reading reports and tables. NetProfiler provides dynamically-generated, interactive visualizations of the TCP/UDP communication with the attacker’s IPs.

3. Track attack signatures from packets

Most attacks exhibit distinct patterns that can be captured through network activity analysis. In this case, the Indicators of Compromise (IOC) are specific HTTP headers present in the attacker’s requests:

• X-siLock-Comment
• X-siLock-Step1
• X-siLock-Step2
• X-siLock-Step3

Configuring the below definition for “Web Application” within Riverbed AppResponse ensures that even a single packet detected in the full bandwidth of data being analyzed by the appliance will trigger an event. Packets can be reviewed, and metrics for that TCP and HTTP exchange will be logged.

Once the definition is in place, you can observe detailed packet-based metrics and access the actual packets through right-click functionality.

Here are some of the typical alerts that AppResponse offers, with numerous other categories available:

Summary

In this blog, we explored how attack vectors follows common patterns to scan for vulnerabilities and how packet and flow-based monitoring tools can be used to analyze past incidents and detect ongoing scans and threats. To learn more about how Riverbed Observability tools can help you protect against malicious actors, please reach out to our experts here.

Get 30k foot view of customer experience

If the telemetry coming back in from the ATM fleet in the form of logs, metrics or traces is still being analyzed in an ad-hoc manner, that is almost like taking a step back in time by at least a decade. Once affected by an incident, without a holistic observability, understanding the underlying root cause of degraded user experience is wrapped in a few assumptions and incoherent analytics or trends.

Compare that, for instance with a screen like below, summarizing the customer experience across the entire ATM fleet, out-of-the-box. To maximize the value of your screen real estate while providing dashboards with high level view of system wide health, Riverbed Aternity diligently distills various analytics and metrics from the entire ATM fleet into a handful of carefully curated numbers, like UXI Score. The UXI Score incorporates health indicators like Crashes, Hanging, and Wait Time.

Riverbed Aternity also captures and provides the following categories of raw of ATM Observability metrics, which are further heuristically distilled into various cocktail metrics like UXI User Experience Index:

• ATM Performance and Stability
• Application Performance and Stability
• Customer Activity Performance

Ultimately, even the most well-provisioned ATM hardware and connectivity can leave gaps in customer experience. That is because modern applications running in production are themselves at mercy of layers of unpredictability. From bugs in the operating system to a manual configuration error in the networking components, the root causes of user performance degradation has many areas from which to sprout. It is therefore very important that measurements of the user experience is a first-class citizen in your observability tools and practices.

Below is an example of another real-time dashboard with a list of each activity performed by users overall. With each activity, we also showcase the breakdown of delays split by network component, server component and user component.

To get you the highest fidelity customer experience data points, Riverbed Aternity breaks down each customer’s transactions by activities. The following diagram clearly shows the relation between a customer’s transactions and what Aternity classifies as activities:

Diagnosing problems in the customer journey

Observability with Riverbed Aternity includes monitoring so diagnosing problems with a poorly performing ATM and looking through each and every transaction performed on it is straightforward. And yes, as you hover over each activity a tool-tip pops up, as outlined in green below, in which each transaction showcases a split of response time by client time, network time and backend time.

Inspect all transactions for an ATM

We can even further deep-dive into individual transaction for a timeline-based view of the performance of transactions. In the image below, we focus on a single activity, Insert Card. It is clear that this transaction typically completes under 20 seconds, as indicated by the highlighted band close to the x-axis. However, there are various outliers, some of them showing exacerbated network time. Once such data-point is highlighted and a detailed tool-tip shows its full details:

Identifying the frequency and trend of these outliers can help narrow down the conditions which cause such degraded experience—a more data driven approach to solving performance problems in your ATM fleet.

Analyze transaction performance

Which machines from the fleet are taking the longest to process this transaction? To answer such questions we can develop further customized dashboards like the one below where we list each activity that users perform sorted by the average time taken on that ATM. This identifies consistently poor performing ATMs where troubleshooting should be prioritized.

Analyze SLA compliance

In Riverbed Aternity, we can also set compliance SLA thresholds for ATM transactions and identify which cities and geographies which are consistently non-compliant with SLAs. The violating transactions are clearly listed along with their average, minimum and maximum values. We can then troubleshoot the poorly performing transactions in their geographies to understand how the customer experience can be improved, whether by improving network time or device or back-end performance.

Visit this page to learn why Riverbed Aternity is the right solution for your customer experience monitoring, whether it is at ATMs, web or desktop.

Andreesen Horowitz released an eye opening report in 2022 on what this can mean for a company’s economics and how high the committed cloud spend percentage is when compared to revenue. According to the report, controlling public cloud spend is a heavy uplift spanning many areas like system-redesign, moving workloads to more efficient hardware or even third party efficiency solutions. Andreesen Horowitz went further, sharing an example of how Dropbox used various optimization techniques and, despite a small dip in revenue, were able to improve their margins just by controlling their cloud spend.

How Riverbed Acceleration can help

Riverbed’s Acceleration solutions have three purpose-built algorithms for optimization to match different needs—Cloud Accelerator, Client Accelerator, and SaaS Accelerator. The optimization engine uses three techniques to reduce bandwidth use: blog or file caching, file compression, and byte stream look-ahead. More details can be seen in this helpful video:

Watch Video

To visually demonstrate how much traffic can be saved in a branch-to-cloud, the image below shows one of Riverbed’s own offices where cost was a pain-point. it ended up reducing data usage by close to 30% without any manual tweaking required on the end servers or services.

Visibility and cost transparency

The first step in reducing cloud cost is identifying potential causes for high spend, particularly bandwidth usage. Determining the root-cause of high cost bandwidth can be a difficult task without the right tools in place. Riverbed observability tools will remain your faithful companion along this journey.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had interactive charts like below—showcasing the big groups or the individual bandwidth hogs in a visual report—rather than going through logs or cumbersome data mining exercises?

Trust Riverbed Acceleration for controlling cloud costs. To learn how Riverbed solutions can help reduce your organizations IT asset costs, visit this page.

SD-WAN’s impact

SD-WAN has become an ubiquitous technology. Today, SD-WAN has mostly replaced traditional wide area network infrastructure. It helps improve WAN fault tolerance, makes cloud connectivity easier, and addresses the difficulty in managing geographically spread-out network devices. However, though SD-WAN excels in these areas, it falls short in alleviating performance issues, and this is where application acceleration shines.

The benefits and shortfalls of SD-WAN

SD-WAN is very effective at monitoring link performance and determining the best paths for a specific application. This capability was a great step forward in wide area networking a few years ago, and today it goes without saying that a branch would have two or possibly three WAN connections for fault tolerance and path diversity. Typically, these would be lower cost connections such as broadband or locally available fiber.

An SD-WAN controller uses various methods to monitor link performance and make automatic decisions based on policies and thresholds regarding which path a specific application should use. For example, if an application requires no more than 150ms of jitter, and a particular link reports more than 150ms of jitter, the SD-WAN can dynamically swing traffic to another path. However, paths selected by SD-WAN can adversely affect latency and therefore application performance.

Application acceleration addresses the underlying WAN related TCP behavior which typically adversely affects application performance. Therefore, these technologies, when working together, provide the most robust and performant application delivery method possible.

Latency and server turns

Beyond a hard-down or significant packet loss the biggest threat to an application’s performance, and therefore the end-user experience, is latency. In basic terms, latency is, the amount of time it takes for a packet to go from a source to its destination. The time it takes depends on a variety of factors, driven by the path traveled by packets. So, improving latency, or in other words, decreasing the amount of time it takes to go from source to destination, is not something that can be done by adding bandwidth.

Packets traverse a network close to the speed of light, but they often get held up by security devices inspecting that traffic for threats or router queues as a result of traffic shaping. This applies to any endpoint, whether it’s an end-user at home, a server in a private data center, a virtual server instance in public cloud, or even an application delivered by a SaaS provider.

What is worse is that applications poorly using TCP and causing even a 1 millisecond increase in one-way latency has been known to debilitate certain applications. Therefore, it is crucial that alongside excellent WAN resiliency with SD-WAN, we must still solve for latency.

Application Acceleration and bandwidth

If you had unlimited bandwidth, would that provide better experience for your users? The answer as in most cases, depends on the situation. However, in demanding situations such as heavy and long file transfer sessions, Application Acceleration can make your application WAN link behave almost like a LAN. So, when it is most needed, our Riverbed customers have been utilizing our acceleration solutions in various form factors—branch to branch, branch to data center, data center to data center, and SaaS to end-users.

Better together, quantitatively

With a setup like the one below, one end in AWS utilizing our Flex VNF SD-WAN solution and the other on-prem using our SteelConnect EX appliance, we have realized performance benefits particularly for bulky file transfers.

In our performance testing of various large file sizes, we have achieved up to six times improvement in file transfer times. The typical benefits we usually achieve with WAN Optimization independent of SD-WAN deployments are also available when SD-WAN and WAN-OPT are service chained together.

Looking closely at the graph below, starting with the the left most bar “SteelConnect-Ex only” indicates the time taken for a large file (non-compressible binary) transferred over 100Mbps over a 160ms without any optimization. Next, as a test end machines’ TCP buffers were adjusted to match bandwidth delay product a bit better, we can see some improvements. Next on the graph, WAN-OPT is enabled using SteelHead but not much has improved in terms of file transfer times just yet. However, a compressible version (let’s say plain text file) of the same size would see a 2x speed improvement immediately in cold (cache miss) transfer as can be seen for the “Cold 2x compressible File” results. And finally, for “Hot Random File,” the right most bar on the chart, a second-pass of the same non-compressible large file would produce close to 10x file transfer time speed up or a 92% reduction in time compared to the first pass regardless of which large file was used.

These gains have been confirmed by ESGs testing.

As a further detail, it is important to note that the results of testing with increasing network RTT do correlate with intuition, without WAN-OPT increasing latency almost parabolically related to longer file transfer times. The bottom two lines are hot and cold transfer times for the 2GB file across various latency values. The top two lines are without WAN-OPT. The difference WAN-OPT made in time saved is quite staggering.

Conclusion

Application acceleration specifically solves the problem of latency using a variety of methods aimed at reducing round-trip time and eliminating the effects of server turns, thereby improving an application’s performance. It also reduces congestion on a link by eliminating unnecessary traffic, caching certain information locally so it doesn’t need to traverse the network multiple times or at all, and optimizing TCP Windows and buffers so end users don’t have to perform advanced TCP tuning. These advantages combined with SD-WAN resiliency provide the best of both worlds for our customers.

Check out the full Technical Validation Report by ESG here.

Quick introduction to CASBs and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Before getting started with the details of Microsoft Defender support in Riverbed SaaS Accelerator, here is a brief overview of CASBs and their place in current enterprise.

The quickest way to understand the technology is that CASBs are an HTTP proxy so that traffic to and from the laptop/machine is intercepted (via an agent on the device), inspected, and gleaned by policies set by the user’s organization via a cloud-based manager. This architecture provides numerous benefits that were either difficult to achieve or not possible in a traditional “enterprise firewall” setup.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps works the same way, except it also involves a DNS redirection, such as the one shown below. This behavior is what sets them apart from some of the other CASBs and why special updates were made to ensure Riverbed SaaS Accelerator supports Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps now supported as part of 1.5.1

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps has witnessed significant growth among the Riverbed customer base who depend on SaaS acceleration. This release of SaaS Accelerator has been especially targeted to support Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps for our customers who use it as their CASB and need Cloud acceleration for its various benefits. Riverbed’s SaaS Accelerator has been tested and validated to integrate with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps starting release 1.5.1. Below is a simplified diagram of how SaaS Accelerator release 1.5.1 integrates via proxy chaining with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.

Below is the configuration page on the Riverbed SaaS Accelerator Manager web UI for setting up to work with Microsoft Defender.

Along with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Riverbed SaaS Accelerator continues to also support Zscaler and Netskope CASB interoperability via Proxy Chaining.

Azure Information Protection support

Azure Information Protection (AIP) is part of Microsoft Purview Information Protection (formerly Microsoft Information Protection or MIP). Microsoft Purview Information Protection helps you discover, classify, protect, and govern sensitive information wherever it lives or travels. 

Various categories of protection within AIP as well as encryption of documents and files have been validated—once the cold pass of the encrypted file goes through Riverbed SaaS Accelerator the subsequent transfers of the file will benefit from acceleration. Also, all protection mechanisms will continue to be honored while the document is accelerated by Riverbed SaaS Accelerator without requiring any additional configuration.

Riverbed SaaS Accelerator will continue to provide WAN acceleration for the various use cases for AIP and harmoniously works with the AIP agent installed on users’ machines. 

What Next?

To learn even more about this release and how to get started with Riverbed SaaS Accelerator, please visit Riverbed SaaS Accelerator Product Page and the Riverbed SaaS Accelerator Release Notes from the Riverbed SaaS Accelerator Support Page. Also, check out this blog post and the included video on implementing the SaaS Accelerator solution for your organization from scratch.

Wi-Fi performance problems

Wi-Fi performance problems intermingling with application and network issues are expensive to isolate and resolve. If your business depends on strong Wi-Fi performance, you simply must have proper visibility into the various moving parts of Wi-Fi infrastructure. Riverbed’s promise for providing full fidelity observability is not complete until we cover monitoring for this important business asset, Wi-Fi.

How can Riverbed help?

Consider the Wi-Fi infrastructure as LWAP (lightweight access points) and WLC (wireless controllers). For these, Riverbed NetIM can provide numerous health metrics across your entire fleet from basic up or down indicators to radio level signal-to-noise ratio measurements. All makes and models of WLCs and APs monitored via a single tool. In addition, after the COVID-19 pandemic, people started to work from anywhere. As a result, at times there was very little control over the Wi-Fi infrastructure available to users. Therefore, a new challenge emerged for enterprises everywhere for monitoring end user’s devices’ Wi-Fi performance. Because of this, in addition to the infrastructure side, to get the full picture, Riverbed’s End-User-Monitoring (Digital Experience Monitoring) via Aternity provides agents which can be installed to obtain Wi-Fi analytics from end user’s devices.

Wi-Fi infrastructure monitoring

Wi-Fi access points and controllers in most large businesses can be quite expansive. In certain cases, each wireless controller can have a thousand or more access points and the provisioned landscape can change quickly with growth and changes in businesses. Monitoring the health of its various components is an important step toward protecting your investment in Wi-Fi.

Infrastructure side: inventory search/reports

NetIM is not only a monitoring tool but has also been utilized by our customers as an intelligent database with a powerful search engine (pictured below) and REST API on top which is not just a passive inventory. NetIM performs health on all devices in its inventory and can automatically identify, absorb new devices and age out decommissioned devices—based on live SNMP and ICMP polling results. Along with that, there are out-of-the-box reports to summarize vendor types, models, and OS versions of your Wi-Fi fleet.

Infrastructure side: monitoring Wi-Fi health

Basic health metrics mentioned below can be easily obtained across the Wi-Fi infrastructure using Riverbed NetIM.

• Access points operationally up/down
• Wireless Controller CPU Utilization %
• Wireless Controller Memory Utilization %
• Number of APs connected
• Number of active WLANs

Infrastructure side: capacity issues

Oversubscribed Wi-Fi channels at the radio level can seep into your infrastructure like sparse distribution of APs leading to overloaded APs. Riverbed NetIM can provide the below metrics for your APs to better manage ever-changing capacity needs across the Wi-Fi fleet.

• Channel Utilization %
• Channel Rx Utilization %
• Channel Tx Utilization %
• Channel User Count
• Maximum Allowed Clients

Infrastructure side: RF interference effects

Co-channel interference (CCI) can be one of the biggest enemies, but general radio interference can be quite prevalent as well in busy cities and office spaces. Once again, Riverbed NetIM can provide the metrics to enable visibility into these problems. I have used the below metric during my Riverbed consulting days to help customers figure out just exactly how significant is radio interference and SNR quality in various sites.

• Poor SNR Clients

Infrastructure side: client mobility

If you have WLC Mobility enabled in your Wi-Fi deployment, you will find these metrics useful, specifically, if you have IoTs that are highly mobile in a localized space. there are more mobility metrics available inside Riverbed NetIM, below is a curated list of some mobility metrics related to Wi-Fi.

• Total Hand-off Requests
• Total Hand-off Requests Sent
• Total Hand-off Denied Received

End-User Wi-Fi experience monitoring

In cases where a DEM agent can be installed on user’s device, the breadth and depth of visibility and analysis available from Riverbed Aternity DEM solution is unmatched. Below is a curated list or Wi-Fi performance dashboards available from Aternity.

End-user side: which band is experiencing the best data rates (2.4G / 5.0G / AC)?

Below is a sample dashboard from Aternity. It clearly shows the throughput of all Wi-Fi bands utilized by users, put in charts stacked together for easy comparison.

End-user side: which clients prefer more advanced Wi-Fi bands?

Sometimes clients can connect to access points using newer protocols and Wi-Fi bands. Such cases are reported in below screen in the Wi-Fi dashboard.

End-user side: which bands are experiencing worse RSSI (2.4G / 5.0G / AC)?

All-important RSSI, split by frequency band and signal quality (Poor/Okay/Good/Excellent) available in this section of the dashboard.

End-user side: what SSIDs experiencing the worst RSSI?

Who are the worst hit users affected by bad RSSI? What were their throughput speeds? Answers to such questions are easily available in this dashboard view.

End-user side: track usage characteristics of users’ Wi-Fi

Picking right metrics to view together for comparisons and contrast is the effective method for proper root cause analysis of problems. Therefore, we have a section of the Wi-Fi dashboard where we showcase the user’s experience for each band by RSSI and throughput.

End-user side: Wi-Fi encryption used by user’s devices—determine whether they might be vulnerable to intrusion/attack.

A full view of the various encryption technologies used by user’s devices is a must. For that, the below dashboard will showcase the encryption technology used by your user’s Wi-Fi connections.

Conclusion

There is a wealth of data for Wi-Fi monitoring made available by Riverbed performance monitoring tools. On the infrastructure side with NetIM and the user’s side with Aternity. Above all, this provides businesses with complete visibility for Wi-Fi performance monitoring. So, make sure you have metrics and analytics and that you are prepared against Wi-Fi performance problems that confound most teams. Wi-Fi performance problems are expensive to bear and resolve.