Cisco Live 2022 just wrapped in Las Vegas and the in-person event — the first Cisco Live since 2019 — brought plenty of exciting news and announcements, including a major milestone for AppDynamics. If you couldn’t make it to the desert or watch the event online, here are some key moments to remember.
1) AppDynamics Cloud is here!
Undoubtedly, our proudest moment in Sin City was the unveiling of AppDynamics Cloud, our all-new observability solution built from the ground up to observe distributed and dynamic cloud native applications at scale. An innovative offering that coexists with our traditional AppDynamics platform, AppDynamics Cloud gives technologists a correlated view of all telemetry data across their entire cloud native landscape.
“AppDynamics Cloud is built specifically to address cloud native monitoring — which often means monitoring a new, modern breed of applications built using cloud provider application services, as well as modern container technology, most notably Kubernetes,” writes AppDynamics Chief Marketing Officer Eric Schou in his announcement blog.
Some of our competitors have simply bolted cloud native capabilities onto their existing infrastructure or APM monitoring tools, resulting in a less-than-optimal user experience. But with AppDynamics Cloud, “we’ve started with a clean slate,” notes Schou. “Rather than adding new capabilities to our core AppDynamics solution, we’ve purpose-built a new observability product to realize Cisco’s full-stack observability vision.”
AppDynamics Cloud will be generally available on June 28, 2022. In case you missed it, here’s the complete Cisco Live 2022 keynote video where Liz Centoni, Cisco Executive Vice President & Chief Strategy Officer, introduces AppDynamics Cloud.
2) The experience economy demands full-stack observability with AppDynamics and Cisco
In the Cisco Live keynote, Centoni also underscored the importance of the burgeoning “experience economy” — one where digital experiences, already the primary channel for reaching customers and end users, will expand exponentially with more augmented, virtualized and immersive experiences.
Exciting, definitely — but delivering on this promise is a daunting task. “To deliver the consistent, reliable digital experiences that we now demand, internal teams must monitor and manage a dynamic set of application dependencies across a mix of infrastructure, microservices, containers, clouds, and solutions. Traditional application monitoring approaches break down in this vastly complex and dynamic ecosystem,” writes Centoni on the Cisco blog.
Cisco’s answer to this complexity is full-stack observability with business context, providing visibility, insights and actions for traditional and modern applications. Specifically, this solution today consists of three core services: AppDynamics, ThousandEyes and Cisco Intersight, which work together to provide 360-degree observability.
This interaction between Cisco and AppDynamics solutions continues to grow. In his Cisco Live session, “Full-Stack Observability (FSO) for App Security in the Cloud,” Randy Birdsall, Senior Director of Product Management at AppDynamics, explained how modern applications — typically distributed across multi-cloud and cloud native environments — dramatically expand the application attack service, leaving development, operations and security teams guessing on how to best manage vulnerabilities. With Cisco Secure Application for AppDynamics, teams can dramatically simplify vulnerability management and protect their business from attacks.
“Our approach is an inside-out security view,” Birdsall told the audience. “Often you’ll find security is done at the perimeter and not inside the application. Our view is, ‘Let’s get inside that app, let’s see what it’s actually doing.’ We want to be able to do that in a performant way, and we want to be able to do it in your production runtime. So right where your customers are using your application, we want to be in there, watching it happen.”
This approach requires three key steps: finding vulnerabilities while they’re running in your applications, detecting malicious threats, and blocking attacks — all in production runtime. This is an important differentiation between the Cisco AppDynamics’ full-stack observability solution and competing products, few of which play in this space today.
For more on AppDynamics’ innovation in this space, check out the Cisco Live talk, “Accelerating Secure Innovation: Full Stack Observability for Modern Apps,” by Sunder Parameswaran, VP of Products, Cisco:
3) AppDynamics customers are happy — and eager to share their success stories
While AppDynamics Cloud basked in the Cisco Live spotlight, it’s essential to remember that we continue to innovate our core AppDynamics solution to help our customers become Agents of Transformation — leaders who reimagine the future of work.
Our Cisco Live booth hosted some of our top AppDynamics customers — AutoNation, Carhartt, Match.com, and the University of Texas at San Antonio — where AppDynamos gave live demos of how AppDynamics is helping these organizations maximize application performance and make every tech decision a business decision in today’s hybrid and cloud native world.
In addition, Adam Rasner, AutoNation’s VP of Technology Operations, participated in our Cisco Live session, “Accelerating Secure Innovation: Full Stack Observability for Modern Apps,” where he explained how AppDynamics has played an essential role in his company’s ongoing effort to introduce new technology to legacy business processes.
For example, AppDynamics has enabled AutoNation to set performance baseline metrics and get ahead of issues before they impact the business. As a result, AutoNation has been able to slash its Severity 1 outages in the past three years by 90 percent — a statistic Rasner says he’s “extremely proud of.”
Bonus takeaway: Full-stack observability and whiskey have something in common — really
Our most popular Cisco Live session (surprise!) was “Exploring Whiskeys Around the World on Your Journey to Full-Stack Observability,” where an engaged audience joined a discerning team of AppDynamos in sampling fine whiskeys from around the globe.
So what’s the connection between this popular distilled adult beverage and full-stack observability? Wayne Brown, a Cloud Channel Solutions Engineering Team Lead with AppDynamics, explained it nicely in his LinkedIn post: “By choosing the best ingredients and paying meticulous attention throughout the distillation process, distillers end up with an optimal product. And by choosing the best tools for full-stack observability (AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer) and maintaining meticulous attention to detail in observability practices, customers end up with a full-stack observability solution that can evolve as their organization evolves,” noted Brown.
So there you have it! Go here to learn more about AppDynamics at Cisco Live 2022. And be sure to check out the latest news and information on both AppDynamics and the new AppDynamics Cloud.
