Riverbed Aternity is Riverbed’s digital experience management family. It covers Aternity EUEM (end user experience monitoring) in Essentials and Enterprise editions, Aternity Mobile, the Aternity 360 bundle, and Aternity APM for application performance monitoring. Aternity is mainly sold as a Riverbed Cloud Service. Customers get a right to access it for their internal business use, for the number and type of Cloud Services and for the Subscription Term stated in the order. Any agent the service needs is licensed only for the Subscription Term.[5] The capacity unit for end user monitoring is the license unit. Aternity says legacy end point licences “are now equivalent to license units”.[1] APM is counted in separate APM licences.[3]
Editions
The Additional Use Rights (v.091726) define two editions of the Aternity EUEM Cloud Service, Essentials and Enterprise. Each edition includes different functionality, and the customer may use only the functionality of the edition it bought.[4] Customers with the Essentials licence buy Application Add-ons separately.[1] Aternity 360 is “a bundled Offering that includes multiple Riverbed Cloud Services”. It comes in several versions, and each version may include different Cloud Services.[4] Monthly Cloud Services credits differ by edition, as the Credits section below shows.[4] Catalog: Aternity EUEM Essentials, Enterprise and Aternity 360 subscriptions.
Aternity Software also runs on-premises, or in Riverbed hosting as the Aternity Hosted Solution. The hosted and on-premises forms are “a distinct offering”, “lack like-for-like feature parity” and “are not fungible”. There is no generally available migration path from hosted to on-premises.[4] Catalog proof: Aternity Hosted Solution requires a valid licence and an active hosting subscription.
Metrics
| Aternity term | Catalog row | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| License unit | Aternity license unit | Weighted by monitoring type[1] |
| Application Add-on | Application Add-on (Aternity) | One application with activities, one user, one calendar month[1] |
| APM license | APM license | JVM, .NET server, container, agentless or metric-only[3] |
| Node execution | Node execution | Remediations and Intelligent Service Desk runbooks[4] |
| Credits | Cloud Services Credit | Monthly allocation per endpoint[4] |
Counting / floors
License units by monitoring type
Aternity lets a customer spend license units on any mix of devices, servers or network, and each category consumes its own number of units. Aternity’s own example is 1000 units covering 1000 PCs, or 700 PCs plus 100 Macs plus 100 virtual desktops plus 20 virtual app servers.[1]
| Monitoring type | Units | Counting basis |
|---|---|---|
| Physical devices (Windows or Mac laptop, desktop, surface PC) | 1 | Per device, with the Agent for End User Devices installed locally |
| Virtual desktop users (VDI) | 1 per username | “All VDI sessions for a single user require one license unit.” |
| Virtual app sessions (for example Citrix XenApp) | 1/4 per session | Each named user running one or more monitored sessions needs a quarter unit |
| Virtual app servers (Agent 11 and later) | 5 per server | Needed in addition to session licences to monitor virtual app sessions |
| Mobile devices (Android, iOS) | 1 per device | Sold as a separate SKU |
| Application Add-ons (Essentials) | n/a | One instance of use of an application with activities by one user per calendar month |
Source for the table: Allocating License Units to Purchase.[1] Catalog proof: Aternity license units are consumed by device type.
Allocation, release and grace period
Aternity allocates license units automatically whenever a device asks to report. An administrator can also reserve licences for specific users or hosts and cap the number of licences for each device type. For example, a customer with 1000 units can limit virtual app servers to 300.[2] Allocated units “remain occupied until the user or device stops reporting to Aternity for 14 consecutive days (non configurable)”. After that, Aternity releases them. A released device that cannot get a licence waits eight hours before it tries again.[2] So a device retired from service keeps its unit for two weeks. Licence counts taken from the console therefore include devices that were active in the last 14 days, not only devices reporting today. Catalog proof: Aternity licences are released after 14 days without reporting.
If the account licence expires, there is a 30-day grace period in which the licence can be re-added. During that period the REST API, My Workspace and NOC auto-refresh dashboards, WAC and integrations are not available.[2] Catalog proof: Expired Aternity account licences have a 30-day grace period with restricted use.
Multi-tenant quotas
Managed service providers can split license units and add-ons between sub-tenants on the Subtenants Quotas screen. A request is rejected when a tenant has too few licences. APM licences are still managed by the Aternity SaaS administrator.[6] The Cloud Services Exhibit separately bars customers from using a Cloud Service to provide a hosted or managed service to others. Service provider use therefore depends on the contract terms agreed with Riverbed.[5]
APM licences
APM licences can cover any mix of agent deployments and application processes. The enforcement mechanism applies to both SaaS and on-premise deployments.[3]
| Agent type | APM licences |
|---|---|
| JVMs on app servers | 1 per JVM process |
| App servers with .NET | 1 per server (covers all .NET processes on it) |
| Containers | 1/7 per container |
| Agentless (serverless and FaaS) | 1/7 per instantiation |
| Metric only | 1/7 per instantiation |
Source for the table: Calculate APM License Units to Purchase.[3] Licences are consumed first-in-first-served, unless an instance is set to hold its licence when it disconnects. Containerized Java and .NET processes are counted the same way.[3] To monitor Kubernetes with APM+, the customer must buy both APM+ and K8s Operator.[4] Catalog proof: APM licences count JVMs, .NET servers and fractional containers.
Floors
The retrieved documents give no minimum purchase quantity for license units or APM licences.
Virtualization & partitioning
Aternity counts virtual environments by user and session, not by host. A VDI user needs one unit for all of that user’s sessions. Virtual app sessions count at a quarter unit, and from Agent 11 the virtual app server itself needs five units.[1] APM counts containers at one seventh of a licence each.[3] Cross-vendor background is in virtualization and partitioning.
Cloud / BYOL
Hosted Solution prerequisites (Additional Use Rights s.5.2). The customer may access the Aternity Hosted Solution only while it has a valid licence for the Aternity Software and an active Hosting Service subscription. If the software was licensed perpetually, the customer must also keep an active Support Services subscription for as long as it hosts. If hosting is not renewed, the customer loses access to the hosted service but may keep using the software for the rest of the software licence term.[4] Catalog proof: Aternity Hosted Solution requires a valid licence and an active hosting subscription.
Data. The customer keeps its Customer Data and may export it during the term. After expiry or termination, it may ask within sixty days to retrieve the data.[5]
Programs
Aternity 360 (Additional Use Rights s.1.3). The customer chooses which eligible Cloud Services to use during the term, within its entitlement. It “must use all Aternity 360 Cloud Services on the same endpoints for the duration of the Subscription Term”, and the services “are also not transferable between endpoints”.[4] Riverbed’s own example is 10,000 subscription licences. The customer may not put one service on one set of 10,000 endpoints and two other services on a different 10,000 endpoints.[4] Riverbed may add or remove Cloud Services from the bundle, and a roadmap is not a commitment.[4] Catalog proof: Aternity 360 services must all run on the same endpoints for the term.
Cloud Services Credits (Additional Use Rights s.2). Credits are allocated each month per endpoint: 10 for Aternity Essentials, 40 for Aternity Enterprise and 80 for Aternity 360.[4] One credit buys one executed node, 500 AI tokens, or 20MB of ingress or 5MB of egress. No more than 60% of the allocated credits may be used on AI services. “All Credits must be used in the month in which they are allocated”, and unused credits are forfeited. Credit-consuming activities stop when the credits run out, unless the customer buys more.[4] The balance is shown in the Credit Usage section of the customer console.[4] Catalog proof: Cloud Services Credits are monthly, non-transferable and capped at 60% for AI services.
Remediations and Intelligent Service Desk (Additional Use Rights s.5.4). Aternity Intelligent Service Desk is included free of charge, with limited scope, in the EUEM Cloud Service. Use of Remediations and runbooks is measured in Node executions per calendar month. Each Remediation execution counts as one Node execution. A runbook counts one execution per Node run, so a runbook with three Nodes counts three.[4] The included monthly amount is set in the order, and unused executions do not roll over. Riverbed may invoice overage at its then-current Node execution pricing after at least two excess-usage notices, once 30 days have passed since the first. It may also suspend access if overage invoices are unpaid.[4] Catalog proof: Remediations and Runbook nodes are counted as monthly Node executions.
Other Aternity terms
- Aternity Mobile. The app uses Google Analytics. Riverbed says the usage data shared does not contain personal data.[4]
- Aternity for Intel Thunderbolt and Wi-Fi. Mandatory Updates must be installed within 60 days. Earlier versions lose support 12 months after the next version, or when the hardware becomes obsolete, whichever comes first. This software is governed by Delaware law.[4]
- Third-party terms. Aternity EUEM Offerings are also subject to additional terms required by Oracle Israel Ltd., which the Additional Use Rights link to.[4]
- Lifecycle. The general Riverbed End of Life Policy does not apply to Aternity products, which have their own end-of-life policy.[7]
Out of scope
- Aternity prices. No public price list was found, and the Additional Use Rights refer to the then-current price list and the ordering documentation.[4]
- A feature-by-feature comparison of the Essentials, Enterprise and Aternity 360 versions. The Additional Use Rights leave that list to the product documentation and price list.[4]
- NPM+ and Riverbed IQ, which are covered in Riverbed network performance management licensing.
- Audit, support and transfer terms, which are covered in Riverbed General Terms, support and audit.