Riverbed Expands Network Observability with Agentic AI and Broader Enterprise Visibility
Riverbed has introduced a new set of network observability capabilities that combine expanded network visibility with agentic artificial intelligence (AI), as organisations look to accelerate troubleshooting and identify potential disruptions before they affect users.
The new Riverbed Network 360 offerings bring the company’s Riverbed IQ and Riverbed Q AI capabilities into its AppResponse and NetProfiler solutions, while extending network visibility across remote users, Zero Trust environments and public cloud infrastructure through NPM+.
The approach is designed to bring together network evidence from multiple sources with causal, predictive, generative and agentic AI to help network operations (NetOps) teams investigate performance issues, identify potential root causes and determine appropriate actions.
“For decades, network monitoring tools have surfaced the evidence, but network professionals have still had to manually connect the dots,” said Richard Tworek, Chief Technology Officer at Riverbed. “That model can no longer keep pace as applications span data centres, public clouds and SaaS environments, employees work from anywhere, and Zero Trust architectures add new visibility gaps across networks IT may not own or control.”
According to Riverbed, Network 360 is intended to address this complexity by combining network evidence with AI-driven analysis and guidance. The company says the approach can help teams move from manual investigations towards more automated workflows, while retaining access to the underlying network data when deeper analysis is required.
Bringing AI into network operations
Riverbed IQ serves as the AI intelligence layer for the company’s NPM 360 offering, applying causal, predictive, generative and agentic AI across connected operational data. The system is designed to correlate evidence, identify potential causes, anticipate emerging issues and recommend next steps.
Riverbed Q provides a conversational interface to the company’s intelligence layer, allowing network professionals to investigate issues using natural-language queries rather than navigating multiple dashboards and tools. The AI capabilities can also be used alongside the underlying network evidence, allowing teams to drill down into flows, packets and other data when further investigation is required.
Extending visibility across hybrid environments
AppResponse and NetProfiler provide two of the core sources of network intelligence within the offering. AppResponse provides packet capture and analysis, while NetProfiler is designed for flow monitoring and analytics across enterprise network environments.
With Network 360, Riverbed IQ and Riverbed Q are integrated into the AppResponse and NetProfiler experience, bringing AI-driven analysis into the tools used by network teams for monitoring and troubleshooting. Riverbed’s NPM+ capability extends visibility beyond traditional enterprise network boundaries, covering remote users, Zero Trust architectures, public cloud environments and networks that may not be directly controlled by an organisation’s IT team.
By combining packet, flow and endpoint-derived network information, Riverbed says teams can gain a broader view of performance issues and their potential impact on users and business operations.
What Network 360 includes
The Network 360 offering brings together several capabilities:
- Riverbed IQ: A SaaS-based AI intelligence and automation layer designed to identify issues and accelerate resolution without requiring additional infrastructure.
- Riverbed Q: A generative AI conversational assistant that allows IT teams to investigate performance issues and query network information using natural language.
- NPM+: Endpoint-based network observability extending visibility to remote users, Zero Trust, public cloud and networks outside an organisation’s direct control.
- Professional Services: Services covering the design, deployment and operationalisation of Network 360 environments, including AppResponse and NetProfiler.
The expansion reflects a broader shift in network operations towards combining increasingly distributed sources of telemetry with AI-driven analysis. As enterprises adopt cloud services, hybrid infrastructure, remote working and Zero Trust architectures, the ability to correlate network evidence across different environments has become increasingly important for troubleshooting and maintaining digital service performance.
Riverbed said the new capabilities are intended to help NetOps teams identify the source and potential impact of performance problems more quickly, while providing a path towards more predictive and increasingly automated network operations.
