There was a time when most critical apps and services ran in the data center. This was a simpler time, when IT still had full control over the app stack, network, and infrastructure.
But times have changed.
Today, the IT industry is being driven by disaggregation and migration to hybrid and multicloud architectures. The modernization of the application environment has prompted more than 90% of large enterprises to adopt multicloud architectures that include a mix of on-premises and public cloud platforms. And, as apps and services have moved out of one data center, becoming more distributed across multiple data centers and clouds, SaaS applications and hybrid-cloud infrastructure have played critical roles in the customer experience and accelerating business growth. Not only this, networks have become more dynamic through the use of software-defined networking technologies.
What’s more, in a COVID-19 world, “work from anywhere” is no longer a trend — it’s a mandate, and businesses must step up to provide seamless experiences for an increasingly remote and distributed workforce.
Problem is, this level of connectivity requires insight into numerous third-party networks and services that are outside of IT’s control. Compounding those monitoring challenges are new, unpredictable variables introduced by remote work: Spotty Wi-Fi, security, and cross-solution workflows, just to name a few.
So, how does IT get visibility and insights into these increasingly complex and unpredictable environments? And do traditional monitoring strategies even stand a chance?
Why Traditional Monitoring Strategies Fail in this New World and What You Can Do About It
In light of the ever-expanding scope of the IT environment, a new reality emerges: Traditional monitoring tools that use SNMP, Pcap, or flow-based mechanisms flatline outside the four walls of the enterprise. These siloed tools — and the swivel chair troubleshooting they trigger — fail to paint a complete picture of your new reality, providing you with a dangerously incomplete view of environments that you may or may not control.
The end result?
Contentious war-rooms, wasteful finger-pointing, and increased Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) or other violations of Service Level Agreements (SLA) or Service Level Objectives (SLO). And this says nothing of the enormous impact these problems have on customer satisfaction, your brand, and most importantly, your bottom line.
Fortunately, as of today, there’s finally a solution for IT leaders who want to take back control of the digital experience, and it’s courtesy of two proven industry leaders, both powered by Cisco: AppDynamics and ThousandEyes.
AppDynamics + ThousandEyes: What’s In It for You?
Together, AppDynamics and ThousandEyes not only fill the gaps of traditional siloed tools, but will also provide a proactive, comprehensive view into the application experience that includes app delivery, app performance, and key performance indicators of your business metrics regardless of where your users are on the globe. To put this into context, let’s examine two use cases.
Use Case #1
Problem: IT’s perimeter is changing. Your business wants to be able to see more in order to get — and stay — ahead of issues.
Solution: Internet & Hybrid-Cloud Visibility
The enterprise of today is dealing with a lack of complete visibility into their end-user experience and services due to the dependency on multiple external entities in their ecosystem — everything from globally distributed resources to third-party API services and so on. Since these aren’t within domains the enterprise can control, mean-time-to-identification (MTTI) has become a critical metric for success here. But without a complete view into all the environments that touch your digital experience, that metric will invariably suffer.
That’s where internet and hybrid-cloud visibility from AppDynamics and ThousandEyes saves the day.
With deep end-to-end visibility from a global internet vantage point, end-user experience monitoring teams can pinpoint issues tied to specific ISPs or specific failures in a cloud-based service along the path of traffic. They can then quickly work with the third-party to re-route around those bottlenecks, for example.
Use Case #2
Problem: More enterprises are using SaaS tools to fulfill mission-critical components of their digital experience, creating the equivalent of a black box when it comes to monitoring these environments.
Solution: SaaS experience monitoring that eliminates blind spots
Every enterprise now runs at least one mission-critical SaaS service as part of their employee and customer digital experience. Visibility and accountability are critical elements of customer service in such environments.
Meanwhile, SaaS adoption continues to accelerate. In Gartner’s Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring, forecasts showed that in 2019, “44% of cloud spend will be on SaaS creating visibility challenges for I&O teams that can impact customer experience, revenue and brand reputation.” That awkward SaaS blindspot in your IT stack will impact end-user experience — and it’s not getting any smaller. So it’s time to take action to pinpoint issues in specific parts of the SaaS landscape.
ThousandEyes provides a variety of options to monitor the SaaS experience in a multi cloud ecosystem, with visibility into the experiences of various SaaS applications delivered to end-users across enterprise and remote locations.
Why the Right Time for Comprehensive Visibility is Now
Given the many modern application deployments and multi cloud networks outside of the enterprise’s control — and the various types of network problems that can come up — we’re seeing a gap in the ability of IT to monitor the business impact of employee and customer digital experiences. And that poses a significant challenge to enterprises that want to accelerate growth and optimize the use of resources.
AppDynamics, together with ThousandEyes, solves this problem by enabling a seamless handoff between network and application operations teams for faster MTTR — all while correlating business metrics, application performance metrics, and outside-in network-related metrics to form a view that line-of-business users care about.