Riverbed Launches Smart OTel for Faster, Actionable IT Insights

Riverbed announced the general availability of Riverbed Smart OTel™ (OpenTelemetry), a transformative solution designed to deliver timely, actionable data to IT teams, enabling faster decision-making and improved insights. Integrated into the Riverbed Platform, Smart OTel enhances the capabilities of Riverbed Aternity and Network Observability solutions, as well as third-party applications.

In today’s IT landscape, teams are overwhelmed with fragmented data, vendor-specific dashboards, and an influx of alerts. Despite the abundance of visibility, critical insights often remain buried. IT teams using traditional OpenTelemetry (OTel) are forced to build custom dashboards to consolidate data sources. However, what IT really needs is a solution that surfaces relevant data instantly for quicker, more effective action.

Unlike conventional OpenTelemetry solutions, Smart OTel utilizes platform-level data collection to enhance analytics, automation, and troubleshooting. When an event or alert is triggered, Riverbed’s patented Data Store surfaces only the pertinent data required for the specific event or business use case, then exports it to any standard OTel collector. By incorporating Riverbed AI and AI-driven automations, Smart OTel adds precision filtering and decision-making capabilities before data export. Additionally, the solution enables IT teams to ingest, process, and export third-party data via OTel, providing unprecedented flexibility and control in IT operations.

Richard Tworek, CTO at Riverbed, emphasized the need for smarter telemetry: “Customers are tired of sifting through massive data streams of raw telemetry to identify issues. With Smart OTel, Riverbed delivers precisely the right data at the right time, leveraging AI, automation, and the OTel standard to empower IT teams to resolve business-critical issues fast.”

Smart OTel is now available as a feature within Riverbed IQ and is part of the Riverbed Platform, which launched in May 2024 as an open, AI-powered platform designed to optimize digital experiences and streamline IT operations. The Riverbed Platform includes several innovative products introduced last year, such as NPM+ (visibility into cloud, remote work, and zero-trust architectures), Aternity Mobile (industry-first DEX for enterprise-owned mobile devices), Riverbed IQ 2.0, Riverbed Unified Agent, and Aternity Intelligent Service Desk.

Enterprises are already experiencing significant benefits from Riverbed’s AIOps for Observability solutions, including millions of dollars in software license savings, reduced IT ticket volume by over 30%, a 86% reduction in false alerts, and improved user experience for thousands of employees.