In today’s press release, Cisco Unveils New Innovations on the Cisco Observability Platform, we announced a host of exciting innovations. This blog will take a deeper dive to discuss how we deliver a unified observability experience across traditional and cloud native workloads and how it will benefit organizations facing challenges associated with supporting mixed environments.
The challenges of mixed application environments
Today, most organizations leverage a mix of traditional, hybrid, and cloud native applications to meet diverse business needs while supporting continuous innovation. While this approach enables them to meet security and regulatory requirements, control costs, and maximize the speed and scale of digital services, it also introduces operational challenges. Managing and monitoring a mixed set of applications with disconnected tools creates silos of performance data that make it difficult to gain a holistic view of the application landscape and lead to extended issue detection and resolution times. A recent IDC observability survey showed that 60% of organizations report that most observability tools serve narrow requirements and fail to enable a complete view1. Not only does this leave organizations without a single source of truth, but it also results in tool sprawl that compounds complexity and can foster friction between internal teams when troubleshooting business-impacting issues in applications that span multiple domains. Longer downtime due to slower issue detection and resolution can lead to significant revenue loss, decreased productivity, and diminished customer satisfaction.
Connecting tools and teams along your cloud journey
End-to-end visibility and correlation from business to applications to infrastructure is a fundamental pillar of our Full-Stack Observability vision. The new unified observability experience announced today at Cisco Live represents a significant step towards that vision. Leveraging the Cisco Observability Platform, we’re delivering the capability for our customers to observe their on-prem, hybrid, and cloud native applications using Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco Cloud Observability with a unified interface.
Fig 1: Showing the unified observability experience between Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco Cloud Observability enabled by the Cisco Observability Platform
Customers that use Cisco AppDynamics today to monitor their hybrid applications leverage it to observe their most critical business transactions, get deep application performance management, and get to the root cause analysis (RCA) in the event of outages. Many of them have been on their cloud journey for several years and are starting to rely on open standards such as OpenTelemetry™ for their instrumentation. As part of the unified observability experience, these organizations can now leverage the latest APM hybrid agents to start on their OpenTelemetry journey. These agents can now transmit dual output to share existing instrumentation with Cloud Observability in OpenTelemetry format.
The pillars of the unified observability experience are:
Fig 2: Cisco’s platform approach to full-stack observability delivers a unified experience by enabling shared operations and use cases when monitoring both traditional/hybrid and cloud native applications.
Shared operations: Simplify administration
Single identity across the products allows users to single sign-on across the products. The tenant onboarding experience is seamless, and the Smart Agent enables common agent management across Cisco AppDynamics and the Cisco Observability Platform.
Unified experience: Enabling workflows to span products without friction
Users can seamlessly harness the combined capabilities of both Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco Cloud Observability. By embracing scalable, flexible, and extensible capabilities and features of the Cisco Observability Platform and extending these capabilities to Cisco AppDynamics, users can maintain the context of the application or business transaction when moving between these products.
Furthermore, this unified approach can decrease the mean time to detect root causes and resolve issues, ultimately enhancing the overall effectiveness of troubleshooting and problem-resolution processes. In addition, a common UI framework provides a familiar look and feel and reduces training friction for the monitoring team.
Shared use cases: Extending the strength of products
In addition to bringing together workflows and operations, our new unified observability experience enables teams to extend use cases across the Full-Stack Observability portfolio. Not only does this eliminate any “best tool for the job” questions, but technology teams also benefit from leveraging the strengths of our products to enrich solutions outside of their initially intended purpose.
The first set of shared use cases we are announcing is:
- Application log troubleshooting that enables Cisco AppDynamics to send logs relating to an application, including tier, nodes, business transaction, and business transaction snapshots, to Cisco Cloud Observability. Users can begin with exploring issues impacting application performance in Cisco AppDynamics and seamlessly transition, in context, to correlated logs in Cisco Cloud Observability to reduce the MTTD and the root cause of any problem.
- Core Web Vitals2 allow technology teams to observe user-centric metrics that help measure a website’s performance, loading speed, and overall user experience. This use case is enabled by ingesting Core Web Vitals into the Cisco Observability Platform through BRUM agents and leverages Cisco AppDynamics to query new endpoints and create new APIs to expose aggregated Core Web Vitals metrics. By focusing on these critical metrics, website owners can ensure that their websites are fast and responsive and provide a positive user experience for their visitors while improving their search engine rankings.
Unlocking the power of the Cisco Full-stack Observability Ecosystem
Today’s announcement is the first step in delivering a unified observability experience across our Full-Stack Observability ecosystem. We will continue providing ongoing value to our customers as we build capabilities to address the seven Cisco Full-Stack Observability use cases and extend the unified observability experience across partner and custom solutions built on the Cisco Observability Platform.
To Learn More:
Schedule a personalized demo of the new unified observability experience. Additionally, we will host a webinar in March to learn more and demo the capabilities discussed in this blog (registration and details coming soon). You can also stay up to date on the latest innovations at the AppDynamics Product Updates page and the resources below.
12023, IDC, “An Executive Blueprint for an Observability Platform: Driving Operational Excellence and Business Outcomes through Analytics and Automation.”
2Regional availability is limited at the time of announcement
OpenTelemetry™ is a trademark of The Linux Foundation®
Sunder Parameswaran is Vice President of Products at Cisco AppDynamics and has 20 years of product strategy and engineering experience in the IT industry. Sunder leads product strategy for cloud native observability and AIOPs at Cisco AppDynamics. Responsible for the strategic direction of product roadmaps, Sunder and his team help customers accelerate innovation by leveraging the Cisco AppDynamics platform to connect business outcomes and user experience with underlying application and infrastructure performance.
