I’m pleased to announce that Cisco Full-Stack Observability was recently recognized as a Leader in the 2024 GigaOm Radar for Cloud Observability. This analyst report examines 21 vendor solutions and reviews their key features, emerging features, and business criteria, and positions them on a chart that reflects their maturity, innovation, and scope of functionality. Cisco’s broad portfolio and our dedication to solving our customers’ most urgent and emerging Observability challenges are why we stand apart in this year’s chart, earning “superior scores in most key features.”
Full-stack observability (FSO) is real-time observability across the modern technology stack — applications, infrastructure (compute, storage, network), internet, security, services, and more — meeting multiple persona needs and correlating business metrics across these different domains. Using high-fidelity telemetry, full-stack observability provides enterprises with in-depth visibility into the behavior, performance, and health of their applications and supporting infrastructure.
Cisco sits squarely in the leaders’ circle, in the “Platform Play” half, which recognizes organizations that offer broad functionality and use case support, and in the “Innovation” half, which recognizes organizations that are flexible and responsive to the market.
Rapid innovation sets Cisco apart
Innovation and customer centricity are core to how we approach everything we do at Cisco. Every day, we solve for new customer challenges while making our products more helpful, intuitive, and user friendly. Recognition in the marketplace is not just an honor; it’s a testament to our dedicated teams and their ongoing pursuit of excellence.
GigaOm recognizes that Cisco is continuing to innovate steadily, with new and interesting features, and categorizes Cisco as a “Fast Mover.” Our customer-first approach to innovation has set us apart in this competitive landscape.
Over the past year, we’ve been rapidly introducing new features across our products. In fact, we are innovating at a rate 2.6X higher YoY! In 2023, we released 636 new features. Just a few among these include:
- Our highly differentiated Digital Experience Monitoring solution — including the Cisco ThousandEyes integration, Session Replay, mobile real user monitoring (MRUM), browser real user monitoring (BRUM), synthetics, Core Web Vitals, and correlating front-end user experience with the back-end customer-owned application — which collectively empower organizations with more insight into their customers’ digital journeys.
- AI observability tools for monitoring OpenAI API usage and a natural language prompt interface to help IT teams work more efficiently.
- Advanced Security solutions, such as Data Security Posture Monitoring (DSPM) for protecting sensitive Data, and run-time application security that help organizations address business risk observability by triaging security events with the highest business impact.
- The Cisco Observability Platform, our extensible, cloud-native Observability solution that provides in-context, correlated, and predictive insights to reduce time to resolve issues, optimize experiences, and minimize business risk.
A broad portfolio to address customers’ most critical challenges
Cisco’s uniquely diverse and comprehensive portfolio can bring together data from across the Network, Infrastructure, Security and Application and correlate them with business context into a single Observability solution.
Businesses are looking to consolidate their tools to help drive efficiency, break down silos, and reduce costs. They’re also looking to reduce vendor sprawl. The ability to turn to one vendor to solve multiple, distinct challenges is very attractive to customers and partners.
Cisco’s innovative products enable powerful integrations, offering IT teams broad support across a variety of their most important use cases. Ultimately, this minimizes tool sprawl for organizations looking to optimize digital experiences. According to GigaOm, it’s our strong feature set — brought together from across our portfolio — that keeps Cisco in a Leader position in the Observability space.
As organizations look for a partner to help deliver exceptional digital experiences, it’s clear that Cisco Full-Stack Observability can provide exceptional results. Our team is here and ready to help.
Ronak Desai is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability and is responsible for leading the overall AppDynamics strategy and operations and driving operational efficiency and delivery, as well as helping Cisco in achieving its vision for Full-Stack Observability.
Prior to joining AppDynamics, Ronak was SVP of Cisco’s Cloud Networking Engineering organization, where he spearheaded major strategy and technical shifts across Cisco’s networking portfolio of products and services, including ACI to ACI Anywhere, 400G offerings, Cloud APIC, Nexus Dashboard and more. Ronak has held additional engineering leadership roles at Insieme Networks — which was acquired by Cisco in December of 2013 — where he was responsible for the development and architecture for the ACI controller and Nexus 9000, Hybrid cloud solutions. He helped drive the development of NX-OS, Nexus 7000, MDS9000 and SAN-OS (the pre-cursor to NX-OS).
Ronak lives in Oakland, California, and enjoys hiking and mountain biking. He holds 50 patents, many of which are currently embedded in the solutions Cisco provides to address the dynamic needs of worldwide customers and technology partners every day.
