Optimize Digital Experiences with AI Observability | Riverbed

Illuminating Virtual Environment Blind Spots with Riverbed

Ariane Paguia — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 22:10:00 +0000

To protect critical customer, business and employee data, more and more businesses are opting to migrate workspaces to virtual environments. Migrating to a virtual environment has many upsides, however can bring unforeseen challenges that can impact performance and undermine the initiative altogether.

The biggest challenge in a virtual environment is consistency in system performance. Resource allocation and oversubscription, network latency to the users end point, coupled with application-related backend processing time, all culminate to the poor experience that the end users may have—resulting in a hit to NPS cores and workforce productivity.

Four primary blind spots in virtual environments

These are the primary blind spots associated with a dip in the performance of applications or services delivered in a virtual environment. Teams need to proactively identify and fix these blind spots to ensure seamless performance:

Latency

Remote display latency is the delay in communication between endpoints in both directions—users to the virtual server or desktop and back. We identify problems in the network path by trending remote display latency protocols, analyzing latency by the end users’ locations and device metrics and correlating application performance to the virtual system that users are accessing. This can easily identify those network segments, branches, or users that need attention.

Application Performance

A “Business Activity” is defined as the discrete actions that users perform in an application—from when they click a button to when the response loads. Aternity has the unique ability to validate the actual user experience for all applications by monitoring these user activity response times, from their perspective, at the very point of consumption.

In addition, Aternity shows the breakdown of that application response time, be it the device processing itself, network or backend related delays. It can also detect crashes, errors, and resource consumption of each application providing a 360 degree view of both application health and user experience.

Host Utilization

Host Resource Consumption (HRC) is a critical metric in identifying poorly performing devices. Aternity finds devices with the highest CPU or memory usage, identifies the users connected and the applications they are running in the virtual environment with their respective demand for resources. This provides a way to right-size the virtualization environment to accommodate to demand and, where needed, remove those superfluous applications.

Device Health

It is essential to track errors on hardware and system on both the front-end and the virtual devices, as well as the components impacted. Aternity analyzes performance metrics to identify patterns with specific health events and find correlations with attributes like the device model, RAM, location, disk type, etc. This easily surfaces those needles in a stack-of-needles, identifying the patterns to quickly feed remediation.

Test drive Riverbed Aternity

Riverbed Aternity is installed via a lightweight agent at the point of service consumption for virtual environments which then automatically monitors any type of devices, be it physical laptops, desktops, or virtual machines. Once the agent is installed it will begin monitoring any type of application, be it a thick-client, web, published virtual application, as well as apps or SaaS applications. Through ML and AI models, the Aternity agent will begin assessing what is normal and begin surfacing areas that are impacting user performance. It does this over any application, any device, no matter where the users are located.

Overall status and performance reporting of critical devices helps identify the reason for latency, such as:

Poor Wi-Fi connection
Poor device hardware health
Poor system health
Resource utilization of laptops
Other apps running at the same time as virtual desktop connection

All of these metrics can be provided through Riverbed Aternity in any type of virtual environment, specifically Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop, Microsoft WVD, HVD and VMWare VDI.

Currently, Riverbed Aternity is monitoring more than 4 million endpoints across our clients globally. Our proven technology supports organizations globally with transitioning to a virtualized environment and keeps things running optimally post-migration, mitigating risk and ensuring workforce productivity. Try Riverbed Aternity for free today.

Improve Your Employee’s Experience With Microsoft Teams Through Riverbed Unified Observability

Ariane Paguia — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 22:20:00 +0000

Have you had a poor experience with Microsoft Teams such as call drops, bad call quality, crashes or high resource consumption? In the post-pandemic world, MS Teams has become one of the key productivity tools most of us are using to collaborate with colleagues and customers. To stay productive and efficient in hybrid workforce, MS Teams experience should be best-in-class from anywhere the users are connected from.

On 21^st of July, MS Teams customers faced a global outage issue which impacted users mostly in Australia, New Zealand and neighbouring ASEAN countries. Did your IT team detect the outage before the users noticed? How did your IT team mitigate the influx of service desk tickets about this outage?

Riverbed can help you improve overall MS Teams performance through visibility, proactively communicating to users, and auto-fixing the common MS Teams issues.

For now, let’s start with the basics—understanding how users access the application.

Where are users accessing MS Teams from?

Users could be accessing Microsoft Teams from across different locations, offices or even their favorite café. It is helpful to group the type of users based from where they are connected–the company headquarters, branch offices or remote locations.

Riverbed recommends monitoring at two points to analyze the performance and user experience on MS Teams using Riverbed Unified Observability:

Point of distribution: Monitoring MS Team call quality and performance from the network through capturing packets and flows, and polling through SNMP.
Point of consumption: Monitoring MS Team call quality and performance from the user devices such as laptops, desktops, VDI, etc.

Point of distribution: network monitoring

Riverbed provides a holistic view of every call made on Microsoft Teams. The dashboard below shows the distribution of call quality, identifies the jitter and latency over time and analyses the corporate and non-corporate traffic going through your LAN and WAN.

Riverbed provides a hop-by-hop analysis of communication from user machines, switches, routers, public internet and backend server. Riverbed also analyses the traffic when remote users are directly connected to the server through the internet. This way, we know which server is being used that could potentially cause latency issues. For example, if the user is based in Australia and the application was communicating through a server in the US, the user will experience high-jitter and high-latency due to the distance from which the packets send the data to. IT teams can then redirect this traffic through a local server for better performance. Having visibility is the key to target what and where the fix should be done!

Another way to monitor call quality is by analysing network packets for each call. Riverbed can identify the MOS CQ, post dial delay, and jitter on each call.

We can also look into Quality of Service (QoS), and prioritise voice and video traffic, just like how airlines have a priority lane for Business and First-class passengers at airports. We need to prioritise network voice and video traffic for MS team users.

Riverbed can help identify the access points where users experienced poor MS Teams call quality in the corporate network. All these metrics can help you identify the source of poor performance and help you enhance the user experience.

Point of consumption: user experience in device monitoring

Riverbed gives you all-round performance and experience insights for Microsoft Teams across your organisation. Riverbed can provide visibility on usage, activity response times, audio and video call quality, resource consumption of app, and crashes and errors.

Riverbed can show the number calls with high latency, jitter, and packet loss out of total the calls made. You can easily identify the call quality trends and investigate each user’s call which showed as poor quality. Each dot in the dashboard below represents a user call.

Riverbed shows insights on response time of user discrete activities, such as launching the app, join in the meeting, sending a chat, and the breakdown of the response time. You can easily identify the domain that contributes most on the delay—client device, network, or backend. It can also show the impacted user commonalities on the slowness by business locations, server, etc.

Riverbed can provide visibility on how much resources MS Teams consumes on devices. For most of our customers, we found that MS Teams consumes at least 1GB of memory on average.

Riverbed io can monitor crashes and capture the errors codes to help IT teams find the root cause and identify the commonalities on users impacted by software version, model of devices, connectivity, and more.

MS Teams outage detection

A global outage issue was reported by Microsoft Teams users on the 21^st of July, 2022 around 11:15AM AEST and lasted for about 2.5hrs. Before our customers start to notice, Riverbed Aternity detected the change on the app behaviour and sent email notifications to the IT team about the low usage. This outage alert is done through our machine learning capability called Anomaly Detection.

The incident, detailed below, shows the traffic highlighted in yellow is the normal usage time of MS Teams. Then, at the time of the outage, there was a sudden drop on usage time and number of users, which is highlighted in purple.

Riverbed Aternity detected the outage and alerted the IT team. This helped the IT team to take action before anyone noticed the issue, allowing them to proactively communicate to users that an outage may impact them and that IT will provide an update once the issue is resolved.

This proactive engagement from IT resulted in:

Mitigation of the potential increase in service desk tickets, as users did not need to create tickets to inform IT that they were impacted.
Improved user satisfaction, since IT communicated the issue before users noticed it.

Auto-remediation of devices

Riverbed can help fix the issue, without the need to remotely connect to user devices, through Auto-Remediation tagged to alert detection. Riverbed Aternity can clear the cache to help L1 support teams fix common issues with Microsoft Teams. No disruption on user productivity time!

Below are the list of MS Teams issues getting resolved after removing the MS Teams cache:

Teams’ status showing incorrectly
Display Pictures not showing
Background images not showing
Unable to login into teams
Unable to find Teams Groups
Members in teams showing incorrectly when compared to web
Displaying incorrect Phone numbers
Microsoft Teams slowness

As we move from remote working to hybrid work environments, it is increasingly critical that we use unified observability to proactively improve application performance and the user experience, no matter where they are.

If you are interested in learning more about how Riverbed can help you improve the overall performance and user experience in MS Teams, get in touch with us and let’s have a conversation.

How Riverbed Aternity Supported Essential Eight Compliance for a NSW Government Agency

Ariane Paguia — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As soon as the world went into lockdown, digital transformation became a top priority. Many organisations saw two years of transformation initiatives carried out in as little as two months. This rapid adoption of digital technologies enabled businesses and governments to keep the show running and helped cushion economies worldwide. But through this period of rapid change, organisations have become more vulnerable to cyber threats. Adversaries feed on uncertainty, and the sudden transition to new ways of working provided them with the perfect opportunity. Many countries witnessed a steep rise in cyber breaches, and security has become a hot topic in management circles. The digital technologies are not to blame, but the lack of a security framework around them is. Customers often ask about how Riverbed approaches cybersecurity, so let’s take a deeper look at a real-world example.

How Riverbed is helping government organisations become more secure

The Australian Cyber Security Centre’s (ACSC) prescribed Essential Eight has laid out a clear game plan for security for government organisations. ACSC’s Essential Eight is a series of baseline mitigation strategies from the ‘Strategies to Mitigate Cyber Security Incidents’ recommended for organisations. Implementing these strategies as a minimum makes it much harder for adversaries to compromise systems. Mapping their activities to Essential Eight framework provides them with a path to level up their security and address ongoing upgrade requirements.

Government agencies across Australia have been mandated to comply with the Essential Eight sooner rather than later. But mandates aside, the Essential Eight goes a long way towards improving your cybersecurity posture. The layer of security tools won’t hamper your ongoing processes, but it will act as a shield that protects you and your communities against adversaries. Compliance will ensure sustainability, protect your credibility, and elevate your role as a government agency.

Three key aims underpin the Essential Eight:

Enhance resilience against cyber attacks
Increase in customer trust
Maintain data sovereignty

It’s important to realise that maintaining security is an ongoing process. We are working closely with several government agencies and helping them implement key network technologies so they can provide uninterrupted services to Australian citizens safely and reliably. One notable project I personally worked on was for a large government agency in NSW.

As the first step to compliance with the Essential Eight, we began investigating devices in their existing network and ensuring we tied up loose ends while keeping the end-user experience intact. When we say loose ends, there are a lot of different possibilities. For example, in the case of this government agency, some of the issues we found included:

Unauthorised applications installed on some devices
Some devices running older versions of some applications
Users not cleared for admin-level access had full access anyway, allowing them to install unauthorised applications freely

Clearly, they needed a deeper dive into their network and security systems and a solution that could give them whole-of-network visibility. Riverbed Aternity suite was the perfect fit for the job. The benefits of implementing Aternity are manifold, so let me walk you through the specific issues we resolved by using it.

Implementing application controls

We began by implementing the Essential Eight mitigation strategy, and the first step for this was Application Control. Aternity helped identify 454 devices out of 20,000 we scanned with unauthorised software installed. We quickly remediated this risk by uninstalling unauthorised applications.

Restricting admin access

The next task was to restrict admin access. Aternity identified 542 unauthorised user devices that were granted admin access. This revelation was shocking for the government agency, as it was like having the keys to the kingdom out in the wild. Users were granted permanent access when they requested admin access to install a particular software for work purposes. Once this issue was identified, they revoked the access of unauthorised users and started granting only temporary access to verified users.

Patching applications and the OS

Essential Eight also prescribes using the latest version of applications and installing patches as and when available. While most of the devices on their network were using up-to-date applications, a few were still not using the latest versions. We found 55 versions of Webex, 45 versions of Zoom and 38 versions of Firefox on some of the machines, which was a considerable security risk.

Strengthening Wi-Fi security

When Aternity scanned all the endpoints, it reported security failure across 64% of wi-fi access points (1,721 access points in total). Aternity monitors all endpoints and can also show where users were accessing the internet from. Some of them were using unsecured wi-fi at cafes, libraries or hotels. When users connected to the agency SSID, we found many devices failed the wi-fi security check. Based on our analysis, this problem was dominant in certain areas, so we could identify specific users and help them mitigate this issue.

Updating AV check status

Aternity monitors all agents, including security agents, on each machine in the network for our client. We completed over 52,788 AV scans in 14 days. On further analysing the results of the status checks, we quickly identified security threats from 54 devices detected by Symantec. 44% of the threats are because of “Trojan.Malscript”.

Implementing proactive monitoring

Proactive monitoring enables anomaly detection and automated alerts. We also integrated Aternity with ServiceNow for this client. When Aternity detects anomalies, it automatically creates a ticket in ServiceNow, and the issue is fixed as per standard SLAs to minimise the impact on users.

With Riverbed Aternity, finding loose ends, fixing them, ensuring Essential Eight compliance, and improving customer experience became effortless. We have laid a secure foundation for their network and user devices. Now, they can monitor security threats, mitigate them on an ongoing basis, and follow up on other Essential Eight prescribed best practices to maintain their security posture. With Riverbed Aternity by their side, they are well-equipped for the challenge.

Have you reviewed the risks to your organisation?

A survey of Australian businesses showed that 76% were victims of cyber-attacks due to a lack of cyber preparedness in 2021. The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) recorded a 13% increase in reports of cyber threats, which comes to over 67,000+ complaints. However, when I meet with clients, it is reassuring that most senior executives and government agencies realise the need for a comprehensive security program that touches all aspects of the organisation.

Essential Eight compliance gives your end customers the confidence that their data is safe and in responsible hands. The rewards make it well worth the investment. Whatever be your organisation’s landscape, Riverbed Aternity fits well into every network type and delivers on your unique cybersecurity needs. Having a trusted cyber security partner can go a long way in securing your network. Speak with us today to explore how Riverbed Aternity can help your organisation.

Windows 11 Transformation Journey – A Seamless Migration With Riverbed | Aternity in Four Easy Steps

Ariane Paguia — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 18:00:00 +0000

Microsoft released Windows 11 to the public on 5th October last year with many exciting new features and security enhancements. Many organizations are planning or are currently executing an enterprise-wide transition to Windows 11. Let’s take some time to get familiar with the technology, what it means for your organization and how you can plan for the transition. After all, you do not want to risk missing out on the benefits of Windows’s 11 but also need to avoid impacting user productivity and business continuity.

Security benefits of Windows 11

A massive push for organizations to enable a remote workforce and fast-tracked digital transformation initiatives have left many vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Fortunately, new features from Windows 11 are raising the bar for security. Microsoft’s latest software adopts the Zero Trust model to protect enterprise customer data and ecosystems. These enhanced security features also mean that there might be a need to upgrade existing PC hardware to run Windows 11. In fact, our State of Digital Experience Q1 2022 report found that one-third of enterprise devices will need to be replaced or upgraded in order to run Windows 11.

Planning your Windows 11 transition

Enterprise-wide Windows 11 upgrades can be a massive undertaking, and if you do not have end-to-end visibility of the entire process and how it impacts your end-users, then your transition can quickly become overwhelming. The key lies in smart planning; using data-driven actionable insights will provide critical support during your transformation journey. Armed with insights from planning to execution to completion stages, your transition will be a lot smoother, cost-efficient and less disruptive.

Whether you choose to wait it out or want to get going already, you will have to upgrade to Windows 11 at some point. However, you can take steps to streamline the transition and make it relatively straightforward. There are specialized tools that can help you gain the visibility you need for a seamless transition, like the Digital Experience from Riverbed | Aternity.

Our Digital Experience takes a four-step approach to migration, which helps achieve end-to end-visibility of your transformation program. It also delivers key insights into user experience post-migration.

Riverbed | Aternity’s four-step approach

We are setting a higher bar for endpoint digital experience management when migrating to Windows 11 with Riverbed | Aternity.

Step 1: Plan

We have discussed planning for a Windows 11 transition in a detailed blog post here. To summarize, the focus here is to get a holistic view of your asset inventory and understand how it affects your bottom line. With the help of Riverbed | Aternity, you can establish your organization’s readiness for the upgrade.

Identify if the hardware is compatible with Windows 11 minimum system requirements. For example, if Jane Doe from accounting is using her laptop since she joined the company six years ago, her machine may not meet Windows 11 requirements. This means her IT team needs to check each device across business functions to see if they meet the minimum system requirements of Windows 11; if not, they will be recommended for device replacement/upgrade.
Establish a baseline to compare user experience with the current Windows 10 device. This baseline will help compare how Jane Doe is adjusting to the new user interface (UI) and if she is able to carry on with her daily job activities without any hiccups.
Understand which PCs and business functions are running legacy/non-Windows 11 supported applications. For example, does Jane Doe use Internet Explorer to run an accounting application? Windows 11 does not support Internet Explorer, so Jane will have to use the application in another browser, and we need to understand if the application will be compatible with that new browser.

Step 2: Execute

Once you know what your asset inventory looks like, form a small pilot user group with users pooled from various business functions and upgrade their PCs to Windows 11. Test all the applications used across business functions and monitor the OS performance for users in the pilot group.

Replace old PCs with those compatible with Windows 11 and/or upgrade OS on pilot devices.
Track the deployment of Windows 11 OS and required drivers on nominated pilot group devices. You can see the device names, usernames, upgrade date for all pilot users and the total number of devices migrated in a snapshot.
Run suitable self-updating tasks on the endpoint devices to ensure they’re Windows 11 ready.

Step 3: Validate

Compare User Experience and Device Health between the Windows 11 pilot group and current Windows 10 users. Once validated, roll out Windows 11 to users across business functions in a phased approach. Riverbed | Aternity reports metrics such as Resource Utilization, App Response Time, Stability Index and App Crashes, empowering the IT team to weed out issues at the granular level for every device in the network.

Step 4: Communicate

Now that you have rolled out Windows 11 to most of the users in your organization, it is time to take stock of the transformation project and share insights with various stakeholders.

Share project progress, failures, and successes with management
With Riverbed | Aternity, you can also compare your own organization’s Windows 11 user experience with that of your peers globally or within your industry

Why choose Riverbed | Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM) platform?

The Riverbed | Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM) platform goes beyond endpoint management to contextualize data across every enterprise endpoint, application and transaction to inform remediation, drive down costs and improve productivity. Riverbed | Aternity has more of what matters to help enterprise users migrate to Windows 11 and beyond:

End-user experience monitoring
IT service benchmarking
Application and desktop performance monitoring
User journey intelligence

It will be a mammoth task for enterprise IT teams to migrate devices to Windows 11, but the benefits of the new OS make the effort well worth it. Change can be difficult, but Riverbed | Aternity makes your transformation journey easier.

Before your organization decides to kick off the transition to Windows 11, speak with a Riverbed | Aternity consultant to help you plan your strategy for a seamless migration.