Welcome back to a new edition of our ‘What’s New in’ series. This month we’re not just picking back up where we left off in May, we’re kicking off a new name for the series with some very big news. June was an exciting month for Cisco Full-Stack Observability and AppDynamics, with the announcements made at Cisco Live, and we have a lot to unpack in this first What’s New in Cisco Cloud Observability!
AppDynamics Cloud is now Cisco Cloud Observability
We launched AppDynamics Cloud at Cisco Live in June of 2022 as a purpose-built cloud native observability solution to solve the challenges associated with modern decentralized applications running across a complex and evolving cloud environment. Over the last year, we have learned from our customers that there is a need to go beyond what we offer out of the box and provide an extensible and customizable solution to solve specific use cases based on business needs.
On June 6th at Cisco Live, we announced the launch of the Cisco Observability Platform. To coincide with the launch, we announced the rename of AppDynamics Cloud to Cisco Cloud Observability, powered by the Cisco Observability Platform. As highlighted in Liz Centoni’s blog, Launch of Cisco Observability Platform Unifies and Secures Digital Experiences at Scale, Cisco Cloud Observability is now Cisco’s premier application performance management solution for observing, securing and optimizing cloud native architectures with business context and delivers extensible capabilities and business insights to help technology teams align application performance with end user expectations, optimize digital experiences and deliver business outcomes while securing modern workloads.
Out of the box, Cisco Cloud Observability delivers core capabilities of the formerly known as AppDynamics Cloud including, cross-domain visibility, correlated metrics, events, logs, traces (MELT) data and AI/ML-driven insights across three focus areas: modern application performance management, multi-cloud infrastructure and multi-cloud Kubernetes® observability. In addition to these core use cases, the extensibility from being powered by the FSO Platform now enables it to address new Optimization and Insights use cases through a diverse ecosystem of modular solutions that extend the capabilities of Cisco Cloud Observability.
A new, extensible and modular observability ecosystem
Delivering and running Cisco Cloud Observability powered by the FSO Platform gives us the capability required to meet the extensible observability needs of our customers now and into the future. The FSO Platform gives our customers the flexibility to extend Cisco Cloud Observability beyond its focus areas. Organizations can develop custom observability solutions or quickly add turnkey observability capabilities by purchasing modules through the new Cisco Observability Exchange that deliver critical insights for workload cost, performance optimization and application security initially, with more in development to address broader use cases.
Fig. 1 shows how Cisco Cloud Observability’s Cost and Workload Profiler identifies excessive cost, and insights on reducing them.
The first set of modules built by Cisco on the FSO Platform and now available for Cisco Cloud Observability are:
- The Cost and Workload Profiler continuously analyzes Kubernetes workloads to provide visibility and insights into cost efficiency and risk to workload performance and reliability based on cloud resource allocation and utilization.
- The Cost Insights module enables users to gain deeper visibility and understand the full fiscal impact of cloud applications by performing cost analysis of Kubernetes resources, such as clusters, pods, workloads and more, and delivering granular insights into cloud spend, including the cost of idle resources.
- The Application Resource Optimizer enables organizations to take recommended actions to optimize resources and reduce excessive cloud spend by utilizing AI and ML to analyze Kubernetes workloads and deliver specific recommendations to optimize resource usage and cloud costs.
Fig. 2 shows how Cisco Cloud Observability’s Cost Insights module breaks down resource utilization into total cost for Kubernetes workloads.
New Google Cloud Platform Infrastructure Observability
Technology teams today need to manage an infrastructure footprint spanning across on-prem, edge and multiple public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In these distributed multi-cloud environments, teams need unified visibility across their cloud providers to effectively manage cloud infrastructure to ensure availability, performance, cost and security. We now support GCP with Compute Engine and in the July release will extend to other services such as Persistent Disk, Pub Sub, Cloud Functions and GKE out of the box.
Keeping up with AppDynamics and Cisco Cisco Cloud Observability innovations
For more information, tune into the How to use Cisco Cloud Observability to enhance digital experiences webinar, and for a complete list of AppDynamics innovations and more information about the new features and capabilities mentioned here, check out the AppDynamics Product Updates page and the resources below.
- [Press Release]: Cisco Launches Observability Platform
- Launch of Cisco Observability Platform Unifies and Secures Digital Experiences at Scale
- AppDynamics Cloud enhancements for hybrid cloud, anomaly detection and usability
- AppDynamics Cloud integrates with Grafana to add key metrics for dashboards
- New AppDynamics Cloud enhancements to extend visibility and reduce downtime
- AppDynamics Cloud introduces contextual troubleshooting and cloud mobility capabilities
- AppDynamics turns cloud native chaos into business context
Sunny Dua is a product management leader with 20 years of experience in digital transformation, application modernization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, business observability and AIOps. While leading large product portfolios at VMware and now at Cisco AppDynamics, Sunny has established a passion for defining vision and strategy and executing complex product roadmaps to build successful and innovative products.
Sunny is a graduate of the Stanford School of Business with interests in the field of critical & analytical thinking, strategic leadership and design thinking.
