Riverbed has introduced Network 360, a collection of AI-powered network observability tools designed to help IT operations teams diagnose performance problems, uncover their underlying causes and identify potential disruptions before employees notice them.
The launch brings Riverbed’s agentic AI technology directly into its established network monitoring products while expanding coverage across cloud infrastructure, remote endpoints and Zero Trust environments. The company is positioning the platform as an answer to a persistent enterprise challenge: critical network evidence often sits across disconnected dashboards and systems that IT teams do not fully control.
“For decades, network monitoring tools have surfaced the evidence, but network professionals have still had to manually connect the dots,” said Richard Tworek, chief technology officer at Riverbed.
At the center of the platform is Riverbed IQ, a cloud-based intelligence layer that applies causal, predictive and generative AI to operational data. It is paired with Riverbed Q, a conversational assistant that allows network engineers to investigate incidents using natural-language questions instead of manually building queries or switching among multiple dashboards.
The technology is being integrated into AppResponse, Riverbed’s packet capture and analysis platform, and NetProfiler, its network flow monitoring product. This combination gives the AI access to detailed packet and traffic evidence, which could make its recommendations more useful than those produced from high-level alerts alone.
Riverbed is also introducing NPM+, an endpoint-based observability capability intended to fill visibility gaps created by hybrid work, public cloud adoption and Zero Trust security architectures. It collects network intelligence from environments where organizations may lack direct access to the underlying infrastructure.
Together, the Network 360 offerings are designed to correlate packet, flow and endpoint data, assess the effect of an incident on users and business services, recommend investigative steps and warn teams about developing performance risks.
The larger goal is to move network operations away from alert-driven firefighting and toward increasingly automated incident prevention. That depends on the quality of Riverbed’s AI analysis and whether enterprises are comfortable allowing agentic systems to guide operational decisions.
“Combining network and employee experience intelligence through a common AI foundation creates a powerful opportunity for enterprises to transform IT operations,” said Whit Walters, field CTO and AI category lead at GigaOm.
Riverbed has not presented Network 360 as a fully autonomous replacement for network engineers. For now, its practical value lies in reducing investigation time while keeping the supporting packets, flows and other evidence available for human review.
