Riverbed says go from ticket queues to zero disruption

The pace of change for workers has put traditional IT support models under enormous pressure. With hybrid work not commonplace and employees using more tools, often powered by AI, the need to minimise disruption and support people wherever they are is driving support teams to look for new ways of working.

The key metrics to measure the effectiveness of IT support have remained the number of support tickets raised and how quickly they are resolved. But what if our assumptions about those metrics are flawed? Phil Lenton, the Head of Product - SaaS and AI Ops at Riverbed, explained.

"Zero tickets is getting a big push but tickets aren't the problem. They're a symptom," Phil said. "It's tempting for organisations to imagine everybody doing self-help and the problems kind of disappear leading to zero tickets. Our counter argument is the problem has not gone away. You're just far less aware of it because they are not being reported."

The rise of AI has led to a perception that users are able to solve problems themselves. But that doesn't get to the root cause of issues. While they might be more self-sufficient, they are still being disrupted from their work.

"When self-help issues aren't tracked, support teams are left with more complex problems. As a result, the MTTR [mean time to resolution] goes up, it like support teams are performing worse."

With zero disruption, support tickets might be logged and closed automatically as problems are proactively detected and resolved. The net result may be more tickets being raised but less disruption. This becomes a more effective measure of business resilience and productivity.

Riverbed's solution, Aternity Replay 2.0, monitors events on the end user's system and records the video while obfuscating private data. When an error condition or some other interruption occurs, the data is captured using a Document Object Model. This enables the data to be quickly analysed using AI.

In one example, Phil said a support engineer can see that the issue they're troubleshooting on one system has occurred on many other systems, there are several common properties and that there is a solution that can be automatically applied. The entire triage and resolution process is abbreviated, minimising disruption for the user.

"It's like a person on your support team who's been around for 10 years and has seen it all. That tacit knowledge is now captured and made accessible," Phil said.

Many of the issues that frustrate users are not major faults but intermittent errors that pop up periodically and are resolved by restarting applications or systems. But by using data and AI, it's possible to detect these issues in near real-time, understand the conditions on the system in the moments before the problem and proactively prevent the error from occurring. This might all be logged as a ticket, but the end user is not disrupted in their work.

"Intermittent or annoying recurring issues are often not logged. Users don't bother logging a ticket as that leads to a call and a bunch of questions. Rebooting is less painful so the issues may not ever result in a support ticket being logged. Our approach means the user can keep working and we gain intelligence in the issue so we can proactively stop it for all users that have a similar issue."

As the data that is collected spans the entire network, it means issues that might not be easily connected by a person, such as when they occur in different geographies, can be correlated and better understood.

Proving the ROI

One of the big challenges for CIOs wanting to embark on a zero disruption journey is making a business case that will convince the rest of the business that there is a worthwhile return on investment. Part of the challenge, Phil said, is that zero disruption is a paradigm shift that needs to be seen.

While there are many vendors offering parts of a solution protecting networks, applications or endpoints, Phil says finding a single platform that spans all three domains is difficult. That's what drove Riverbed to release Aternity 360.

"Aternity 360 is a single package that consolidates tools. It uses industry standard tools such as Open Telemetry, which reduces deployment costs and eliminates agent lock‑in. It also blends deterministic runbooks with generative AI to deliver repeatable, governed automation," Phil explained.

A single platform enables CIOs to undertake a proof of concept without needing to integrate multiple tools. The result of that trial can show value quickly, enabling the CIO to make a strong case to the CFO and their other peers in the C-suite.