Over the past couple of years, a new world of online possibilities from contactless pizza delivery to biometric airline ticketing to virtual concerts have cropped up. Now, with 76% of respondents saying their expectations of digital experiences have increased since 2020, most organizations are shifting priorities for application infrastructure management — by adopting solutions to address that need while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction.
Brand perception is everything
When experiences define a brand, companies must adapt. This includes adjusting to changes in the competitive landscape and rethinking technologies, processes and organizational structures — or face the risk of churn. Especially when 49% of respondents will happily switch to a competitor if the alternative is dealing with poor experiences.
A perfect storm caused pressure to accelerate
In our 2020 survey of over 1,000 IT professionals, 66% said the pandemic exposed weaknesses in their IT strategy and created an urgency to compress multi-year digital transformation projects into months. Which in turn had a huge impact on applications as they were broken into microservices across multiple cloud providers and SaaS components, all in the service of faster development. The result being exponentially more complex tech stacks. And as these distributed services and interdependencies grew, lack of ability to identify root causes of performance issues reached problematic levels.
Adding to these issues, workstreams are more siloed than ever as application teams focus on app topologies while infrastructure teams focus on workloads and stacks. Consequently, many organizations have overly complicated operations that lack tools to correlate insights across a single source of truth.
Going beyond application performance monitoring
To improve communication between teams and eliminate IT silos, companies are leveraging AppDynamics with Cisco Intersight for visibility into dependencies between applications and infrastructure. With Cisco Intersight, when users run into application issues at any stack layer, changes needed to improve application performance are identified. Cisco Intersight also automatically executes these changes for continual optimization of the application to deliver premium digital experiences.
Integrating AppDynamics with Cisco Intersight addresses the two interdependent factors that application performance relies on. AppDynamics checks apps are written and architected well while Intersight provides the critical second piece: providing infrastructure resources at the right time by automatically talking to and ingesting information from AppDynamics. With this proactive approach to application and infrastructure performance, IT teams can identify and then fix performance issues — before they impact end users.
Traditional infrastructure monitoring vs. application-aware infrastructure
With traditional infrastructure monitoring, the application and its components are essentially a black box. Cisco Intersight with AppDynamics goes outside the box by creating an application-aware infrastructure that understands application resource utilization, composition and performance — in addition to infrastructure and also compiles and analyzes multiple points of data, including metrics around:
- CPU (e.g. threat utilization, core utilization, wait time)
- Network (e.g. latency, relationships, bandwidth)
- Cost (e.g. reserved instances, $/instance/hour)
- Memory (e.g. utilization, swapping, ballooning)
- Storage (e.g. IOPS, capacity, throughput, compression)
- Compliance (e.g. licensing, data sovereignty, business constraints)
These data points help provide insights relevant to visibility, decision making and analysis. However, visibility is not the only goal. They also provide actionable insights, helping IT teams determine which actions to take with the infrastructure to improve performance and minimize cost.
AppDynamics combined with Cisco Intersight supports a number of use cases to improve application performance:
- Performance control and optimization: Providing applications with the needed resources from the underlying infrastructure — whether on-prem, in hybrid or in cloud native architectures.
- Migrate to the cloud with confidence: Prioritize workflows and help tame the complexity of the cloud with unified visibility, allowing cloud native applications to deliver business value before, during and after migration.
- Cost and resource utilization optimization: Help transform operations from reactive to proactive with intelligent app resourcing and cost optimization.
Meeting the needs of digital customers
A company’s ability to execute flawless experiences has a direct impact on its brand image now that digital-first impressions are so important. However, between accelerated timelines, siloed teams and growing digital complexity, it is a challenge for companies to gain the insights needed to consistently deliver — but AppDynamics and Cisco Intersight offer the tools and insights needed to help overcome these challenges and empower organizations to deliver world-class digital experiences through superior infrastructure and application management.
Start your free 45-day trial of Intersight for AppDynamics
Whether you run your applications on-prem, in the cloud or both, leveraging the combined power of AppDynamics and Cisco Intersight can help bridge the gap between applications and IT infrastructure. To see how your organization can benefit, request your free 45-day trial today.
