In any organization, technology plays a vital role in nearly every aspect of the business — from marketing to operations to human resources. But increasingly, its role in revenue generation is taking center stage. Profitability and growth are now in the hands of CTOs and CIOs.
Unfortunately, technologists have long struggled to correlate business insights and performance insights across complex cloud native application architectures. It’s challenging to spot and resolve app performance issues before they impact user experience or the bottom line, putting organizations at unnecessary risk. To solve this problem, we developed business transaction insights.
Unveiled at AWS re:Invent in November, this new capability available in AppDynamics Cloud provides technologists with the visibility and control needed to optimize performance and swiftly remediate potentially problematic situations.
Let’s dive into what business transaction insights are, why they deserve a spot in every technologist’s toolkit, and how they give IT teams the business context needed to identify and address the most business-critical issues first.
Business transaction insights: What drove Cisco AppDynamics to develop these capabilities
The fast-paced world we live in places a high value on customer experience (CX). With the proliferation of apps, CX has become the most important brand differentiator, eclipsing price and product.
But here’s the rub: Most customers won’t tell you exactly how or where their experience was disappointing. Statistics show 25 out of 26 customers churn without explanation. When a digital experience fails to meet end user needs, they simply take their business elsewhere, giving organizations little (if any) time to fix the problem.
Decision-makers shouldn’t interpret a lack of negative feedback as good news. Nor should they devote too much time to analyzing and reconciling the vast amount of data their systems produce — they don’t have the luxury.
With business transaction insights, technologists can cut through the noise of modern application environments.
Supporting cloud native applications and workloads hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), business transaction insights combine OpenTelemetry data with AWS CloudWatch data to help IT professionals monitor overall application health. Extracting financial metrics and correlating them with technical data, business transaction insights enable teams to focus on the most pressing business priorities within a shared business context.
Cisco AppDynamics and AWS: A shared vision
The partnership between Cisco AppDynamics and AWS aims to accelerate the journey to full-stack observability across multiple systems.
Organizations are turning to cloud native applications for their scalability and flexibility and to build and run those apps, many partner with AWS to achieve the best user experience and gain a competitive edge. But one of the biggest challenges is extracting insights from their critical business transactions.
Cisco AppDynamics Cloud business transaction insights offers a simple and insightful way to improve app performance and user experience — while also driving maximum value from AWS investments and leveraging the platform’s robust capabilities.
The benefits of business transaction insights
Business transaction insights focus on two key activities our customers are often most challenged by: business transaction monitoring and root cause analysis.
Business transaction monitoring
DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams deal with different layers of large-scale systems, fragmenting their attention. Identifying mission-critical transactions requires sifting through the sheer quantity and complexity of data generated by modern applications — switching between tools or tabs as they examine different parts of their stack.
“The focus point is to guide users to follow the red and get to the root cause quickly. They’re able to bring insights across metrics, events, logs and traces and also across different domains — whether it’s application performance management, network infrastructure, monitoring, or business monitoring.” — Sunder Parameswaran, Vice President of Products, Cisco AppDynamics
Cisco AppDynamics Cloud business transaction insights allow technologists to discover every business transaction and create a detailed topology map of how traffic flows within their applications. This provides context for what matters most to any given organization using advanced technology that identifies relevant journeys for its business.
Root cause analysis
Performing a root cause analysis involves multiple teams. But as each team defends its siloed data, mean time to resolution (MTTR) goes up, and productivity goes down. Cisco AppDynamics ends the debate by bringing a shared source of truth into the picture through continuous-context experience.
Any team looking at it will understand where they fit into the stack and how it relates to the overall business. Tying this into the business transaction insights facilitates the rapid identification of underlying problems and their significance.
“In this universe, there’s something called entropy, which is this force toward disorder. And so we understand deeply that everything will fail, eventually, and that we need to make sure that we design these structures, architectures, and systems to adapt to that failure.” — Nirmal Mehta, Principal Specialist Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Cisco AppDynamics automatically triggers diagnostic actions whenever a critical business transaction such as logins and check-outs become unresponsive. Technologists receive AIOps-driven alerts, enabling them to identify, prioritize and resolve critical issues impacting customer experience and key business metrics as soon as they arise.
Remediate app performance issues in real time
Business transaction insights help technologists identify critical transactions and notify them of anomalies that threaten business continuity. With this capability, organizations can address the most urgent issues related to app performance and user experience — before they impact the bottom line. And when business stakeholders and IT operations teams can collaborate seamlessly within a shared context, there’s no limit to the growth you can achieve.
Explore Cisco AppDynamics business transaction insights
Using AWS to host your cloud native app or digital services? Find out how business transaction insights can help you ensure optimal usability.
