The Riverbed Blog

Cascade Pilot & Shark 101: What new users need to know

by Grant N | May 23, 2013 in Packet Capture, Technical, Virtualization | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

If you haven't already, you can download free trials of both Cascade Shark Virtual Edition for continuous packet capture and monitoring vSwitch traffic, and Cascade Pilot for packet analysis.

And, of course, you will read the documentation first, right? EVERYBODY reads the instructions first. Come on, all the cool kids read it. I know, I know, I know. You're just so excited to get these babies in action that you can't hit the "next" button fast enough.

To the noobs, I recommend the Getting Started videos that you see when you first start Cascade Pilot. Sure, there's always the manual, but that just isn't the first place most people go for answers. They're going to call support. Or watch a movie!

My top 2 getting started videos:

#1: Intro

The bad news: it's about eight and half-minutes long.

The good news: it's time well spent. The video provides a great overview of what you can do and how to do things like analyze live traffic or saved *.pcaps, or connect to Sharks.

#2: Cascade Pilot & Shark with Wireshark

The bad news: I don’t provide support for Wireshark. It's open source, so I recommend you go here. Or maybe here.

The good news: Gerald Combs works for Riverbed! Plus:

You can use Wireshark filters in Cascade Pilot.

You can open a 10 GB file in Cascade Pilot in 10 seconds.

These videos are what I consider "Shark 101." If you're ready for the next step (Shark 201?), it's time to go back to school: Sharkfest at UC Berkeley! Hosted by Riverbed, the user conference takes place from June 16-19, with serious experts, like Wireshark creator Gerald Combs and network expert Hansang Bae taking the stage.

Dr. Dobb's Jolt Award Winner - AppInternals Xpert

by Liz Padula | May 22, 2013 in Contests, Riverbed Performance Management | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Time is a terrible thing to waste, regardless how little. Just ask a photo-finishing Olympic sprinter the value of a hundredth of a second. It’s the same for business. For the leading online retailer, a 100-millisecond increase in web page load time leads to a 1% drop in sales. At the world’s largest search engine, a 500-millisecond delay leads to a 20% drop in traffic. And a financial services broker can lose $4M per millisecond if the trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition. Similarly, IT downtime and slow applications reduce the total productive output of your workforce, which in this day and age can translate almost immediately to lost revenue.

So what can you do to ensure peak application performance? If you are a reader of Dr. Dobb’s (an online publication for the world of software development), your solution may be found with Jolt Testing Tool Awards winner, AppInternals Xpert.

Two seconds, just two seconds. It doesn't sound like much — except to a company trying to serve Web pages to impatient customers. So what do you do if you aren't currently able to meet that high standard in your multitiered Web application? AppInternals can come to the rescue. Its' sole focus is helping you meet your performance requirements.

In their announcement of award winners, Dr. Dobb’s quips that, “No one outside of the fraternity of testers truly likes testing tools.” Here at Riverbed with one of the award winners, AppInternals Xpert, we may debate testing tools’ popularity but that is for another discussion that might include whether you like going to the dentist. Rather, we wholeheartedly agree that a tool such as AppInternals Xpert, which was designed from the ground up to uncover application problems across the app lifecycle, certainly stands out as a Productivity Award winner. Even with today’s complex multitier applications, AppInternals Xpert can proactively detect issues before they impact the business as well as analyze applications prior to deployment – improving productivity and reducing risk. It is an honor to be recognized in these prestigious Jolt Awards, known as one of the best ways of seeing which are the best products in the testing genre.

As part of the awards judging process, the Jolt judges kicked the tires, selected finalists and looked under the hood to decide winners. They uncovered some of the cool features of AppInternals Xpert such as:

Real language, Google-style questions like "Which test user accessed the homepage using the troublesome transaction identified in the drill down?" or "Which transactions use the troublesome SQL statement?"

Real-time transaction maps that make it possible to identify the one or more things causing excessive delays

Specific dashboards that give a quick surface summary of time-consuming trouble spots across one or many applications, along with hyperlinked drill-down data in separate presentations

An optimized database that collects all the information records and indexes all transaction traces allowing for a big data approach to application performance management - making it fast and easy to find a single transaction among billions

The judges wrote, “Simply put, whatever is happening inside your system, it's probable AppInternals Xpert will find it and reveal it to you in a display that contains a wealth of supporting data.”

That is pretty compelling for application support teams and developers who have been seeking a tool to more quickly and collaboratively identify, troubleshoot, and debug application performance issues. With AppInternals Xpert, you can now integrate end-user experience monitoring with code-level transaction tracing and monitoring of application and system performance metrics. This comprehensive approach can save you those milliseconds of time, boost application and business productivity and certainly distinguishes AppInternals Xpert as a Jolt Testing Tool Awards winner.

Don’t waste time, to learn more about AppInternals Xpert, please download the product brief, read a recent press release about AppInternals or visit the product page.

Are my videos being watched?

by Nick Amato | May 22, 2013 in App Delivery, Technical | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

One morning last week I came into work and wondered: how much of our technical videos are being watched? At Riverbed we make a lot of short videos to help customers deploy and configure things (and not necessarily our own stuff, either, many times we'll help configure applications like Exchange).

The first place I checked was the data available from our video platforms, namely Wistia and (to some extent) YouTube. Analytic information is readily available on YouTube, and hats off to the Wistia folks for having an awesome REST API for pulling statistics. Of course this may not apply if you're in the big leagues for web traffic -- you are more likely to be paying attention to things like the comScore online rankings -- but for the scope of data I needed the APIs worked well.

Looking at all of our videos over the past few months, I found that one way to make sense of this is to plot the view count vs. amount of video watched (also called "engagement") on an X-Y axis. At this point it becomes clear that there are some "home runs", some "singles and doubles", and maybe a few "strikeout" videos. To enable taking action based on this new info, I put each video into one of these categories. This allows us to see what we need to do to convert our singles/doubles into home runs and to do less of what's in the strikeouts. Also, it gives us a more consistent idea of the broad categories of how well videos are doing.

How do you draw lines to make the categories? Here's a neat trick: you can do a k-means analysis divide these data points. This is easily done in Excel if you have the data (here's a site that shows you how). In this case I used the excellent Perl Algorithm::KMeans module after translating the result of the above APIs into a comma-separated format. The results of this on a set of recent videos are in the below chart, with the red dots being a center of each of three general categories (home runs, doubles/singles and strikeouts). This ended up being a useful way to group videos together and see what they have in common, and to increase our "batting average" overall.

So.. we'll get back to work making videos that cover all kinds of topics related to IT performance optimization. In case you're wondering, here's the most-watched video so far in 2013!

How WAN optimization, application delivery controllers and performance management solutions help deliver excellent user experience

by Justyna Bak | May 21, 2013 in App Delivery, Application Acceleration, Bandwidth Optimization, Mobile, Riverbed Performance Management, Virtualization, WAN Optimization | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

We are obsessed with productivity: 74% of mobile consumers in the U.S. use productivity enhancing applications. One in five users checks his or her phone every 10 minutes for updates and to access, among many things, cloud-based productivity apps, such as Gmail and Google Drive or Dropbox. But for many, their productivity is undermined by a poor user experience.

Today, we take for granted fast and ubiquitous access to applications and data from any device and any location. During a recent trip to upscale retailer Nordstrom, I wasn’t surprised at all when a store employee pulled out an iPad to check the color options for a handbag I was evaluating. What started as a stellar customer service was soon tarnished as the website took way too long to load. For an impatient shopper like me, a minute looking at the spinning wheel feels like an eternity. Within a minute I had already scanned the entire handbag collection on the store shelves and then realized I had a discount coupon for Bloomingdale’s. I was ready to move on.

Half of mobile users abandon a page if it doesn’t load in 10 seconds, and three out of five won’t return to the site. Amazon calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. The impact of poor application performance on user productivity and experience is indisputable. Yet, 78% of organizations globally suffer from sluggish applications, at least occasionally.

Healthcare turning to VDI to improve patient care

by Pamtakahama | May 17, 2013 | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

I recently took my daughter to the doctor for an earache, and chuckled when the pediatrician reached into his lab coat for what I thought was an iPad to write up a prescription only to realize it was, ahem, a good ole’ fashioned pad of paper!

Spending another 45 minutes filling the prescription had me wondering how far the healthcare industry has come in the last 10 years. Notwithstanding the isolated throwback to the pencil and paper era, the reality is that the healthcare industry is reinventing itself, and in the process reshaping our experiences, and reorienting our expectations from how care is managed, to how it is paid for, to how it is delivered.

From the trenches of Interop Las Vegas 2013

by Liz Padula | May 09, 2013 in Packet Capture, Riverbed Performance Management, Visibility | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Posted on behalf of the author, Heidi Gabrielson, who currently is giving lots of demos from booth #1139 at Interop Las Vegas...

I took an informal poll of the Riverbed Performance Management booth staff yesterday after the Interop show floor closed to try to understand if there were any common themes emerging from the hundreds of attendees that stopped by the booth (#1139). There were several… end-user experience monitoring, VoIP / unified communications, troubleshooting Citrix, virtualization, and dealing with application complexity topped the list.

End-user experience monitoring was the most frequently asked about capability. Network and application managers are realizing that it’s all about the user and that proactively monitoring end-user experience leads to a better overall application experience not only for users but also the support staff themselves. They recognize that they need real insight into what their users – whether they are employees or customers – are actual experiencing. They want to take the guess work out of understanding who is having problems, where, and why, and what impact that problem is having on the business!