Riverbed Technology is updating its network planning portfolio and the SteelCentral NPCM product family, give users three new capabilities, new tools to configure and monitor their network data, and provide real-time updates for IT administrators, faster troubleshooting and network availability.

The new offerings, which are available immediately in all regions in which Riverbed has a presence, including South Africa, are designed to help organisations that have to collect data from a range of sources—both on-premise and in the cloud and manage and configure the networks they have to run on. But simple planning and configuration monitoring tools are not enough – you need to align that activity directly with sustained monitoring, so that it’s possible to see the effect of changes as they happen. This is especially critical for the hybrid enterprise, which must deal with both on-premises applications and cloud-delivered services.

As performance troubleshooting teams know all too well, relying on out-of-date network change, topology and configuration data while keeping up with business-critical network and application obligations drives high IT operational costs and reduces staff productivity. Businesses need to prevent outages rather than troubleshoot them, said Nik Koutsoukos, senior director, product marketing, at Riverbed in a statement.

NPCM help overwhelmed IT staff keep their network in compliance with an ever-increasing number of regulatory, organisational and security policies. At the same time, the solution reduces outages due to misconfiguration by up to 70 persent using automated network configuration analysis instead of manual methods.

NetAuditor ensure the availability of business-critical network services by detecting network device configuration errors and preventing outages in business-critical services. The software improved mean-time-to-resolution three times or more after implementation.

NetPlanner helps organisations plan for network resiliency despite network changes and growth. Creates a network model that combines multiple sources of data to deliver more accurate predictions of network behavior and performance.

Through NetCollector users can reduces time and effort spent manually collecting and reconciling network data, automatically detects and collects configuration and operational data and validates configurations to check for errors and violations.