Riverbed has introduced new network observability solutions that combine agentic AI with 360-degree network visibility.

The new offerings aim to help network operations teams speed up troubleshooting. They also aim to identify root causes faster. Additionally, the tools are designed to predict emerging issues and prevent disruptions before they affect users.

The updated Riverbed Network 360 suite integrates the agentic AI capabilities of Riverbed IQ and Q. These are now built natively into Riverbed’s AppResponse and NetProfiler solutions. Meanwhile, NPM+ extends network visibility across remote users, Zero Trust environments and public cloud deployments.

As a result, the offerings bring together deep network evidence, wider enterprise visibility, and causal, predictive, generative and agentic AI. Together, these elements are meant to help NetOps teams prevent disruption rather than simply react to it.

Richard Tworek, Chief Technology Officer at Riverbed, commented on the shift. He noted that network monitoring tools have historically surfaced evidence, but professionals still had to connect the dots manually. However, he said this approach struggles to keep pace as applications now span data centers, public clouds and SaaS platforms. Furthermore, employees increasingly work from anywhere, and Zero Trust architectures add visibility gaps across networks IT may not fully own or control.

Consequently, Tworek said Network 360 brings agentic AI directly into network operations. It does this by turning network evidence from hybrid environments into contextual insight. In turn, this supports faster root-cause identification, predictive awareness of emerging issues, and recommended next actions. He added that the goal is to move NetOps teams from slow, reactive investigations that once took hours or days toward guided, AI-driven workflows. Over time, this is expected to lay the groundwork for more autonomous action before disruptions reach users or the business.

Agentic AI Capabilities Explained

Riverbed NPM 360 is designed to address these operational challenges directly. Riverbed IQ serves as the intelligence layer behind NPM 360. It applies causal, predictive, generative and agentic AI across connected operational data. Specifically, it helps teams correlate evidence, identify likely causes, anticipate emerging issues and determine suitable actions.

In addition, Riverbed Q offers a conversational, natural-language interface to this intelligence layer. This allows network professionals to accelerate investigations without switching between multiple dashboards, queries and tools. Together, IQ and Q analyze network evidence, recommend next steps, and let practitioners drill into underlying flows, packets and other evidence when needed.

Bringing AI Into Existing Tools

AppResponse and NetProfiler remain two foundational sources of network intelligence within the platform. AppResponse delivers full-fidelity packet capture and analysis. NetProfiler, on the other hand, provides enterprise-scale flow monitoring and analytics across complex network environments.

With the new NPM 360 offering, IQ and Q now function as native capabilities within the AppResponse and NetProfiler experience. Therefore, causal, predictive, generative and agentic AI is brought directly into the tools network teams already use to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize performance.

Meanwhile, NPM+ extends visibility across remote users, Zero Trust architectures, data centers and cloud environments. This significantly expands the network evidence available to NetOps teams. By unifying packet, flow and endpoint-derived intelligence with AI-powered analysis, NPM 360 is intended to help IT teams isolate performance issues quickly, understand business and user impact, predict emerging risks, and accelerate resolution.

Riverbed NPM 360 includes the following components:

• Riverbed IQ, a SaaS-based AI-driven intelligence and automation layer that pinpoints issues and speeds resolution, without requiring additional infrastructure.
• Riverbed Q, a generative AI chat assistant that helps IT teams investigate performance issues, surface insights and take informed action through natural-language queries.
• NPM+, endpoint-based observability that extends visibility across remote users, Zero Trust, public cloud, and networks the enterprise does not directly own or control.
• Professional Services, support for designing, deploying and operationalizing the Network 360 environment alongside AppResponse or NetProfiler, ensuring the right coverage, workflows and outcomes from day one.

Overall, the announcement reflects a broader industry shift toward embedding AI directly into network observability platforms, rather than treating it as a separate add-on. As enterprise networks grow more distributed, this kind of integrated network observability approach is likely to become increasingly common among IT operations teams.

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