Page 2 - FCW, March/April 2021

Marlin McFate
Chief Technology Officer for Riverbed Technology’s Public Sector
Sean Applegate
Chief Technology Officer at Swish Data
Q: Why are agencies investing in observability? McFate: Organizations typically have one of a few paradigms. One is they don’t have any visibility at all; they aren’t tracking things. Secondly, they don’t have the right tools in place. Or, they have lots of information, but no way to figure out what is relevant and no way to correlate that data to find the context within it. Observability is the capability to take that information and use it to increase mission velocity.
Q: How does observability empower agencies? McFate: Every second you can possibly shave off from the time it takes to figure out why data can’t get from Point
A to Point B or why somebody can’t connect, matters. By taking that data and being able to combine it to get more relevant conclusions and speed mean time to resolution, you solve the issue for somebody quicker, which means they spend less time unable to do their jobs.
Applegate: Observability often brings together teams
in ways that are very healthy for the organization and allows them to problem-solve more collaboratively. It’s
a generative culture, meaning they’re aligned with the mission and they’re able to take very rapid action. It empowers those organizations to bust the silos, and it also empowers them to be curious and ask complex or difficult questions but work on it together.
Q: How is SteelCentral well-suited for observability? Applegate: We collect data that would typically be siloed, and we correlate and stitch it together. Now, information the network team might have been looking through with high-fidelity tools is being stitched together with data from applications or end-user workstations. Suddenly, data that indicated things were fine, now says there might be a problem. SteelCentral brings not only great performance visibility of varying degrees of fidelity that scale at the enterprise level, but also a high degree of cybersecurity analytics. It allows organizations to work together better, so they can collaborate and improve performance or identify cybersecurity issues.
THE FULL PICTURE
Traditionally, we talk about visibility and it may seem like visibility and observability are the same thing. Observability is
a by-product, or more importantly,
the intended result of visibility. If you think of visibility as the capability to
“see or collect” data such as packets, flow, etc., observability is the “finding” of something relevant. We only find relevancy when we can extract context through correlation. Riverbed and Swish Data have teamed up to bring customers observability by unifying network visibility across functional areas.
Gain Observability with Swish Data and Riverbed mc.swishdata.com/swish-riverbed-contactus