In a bid to meet customer demand, businesses today are innovating and scaling in faster, more cost-effective ways than ever before. But with this new scale and efficiency also comes greater operational complexity, reducing visibility across the entire technology stack.
As a result, most organizations don’t fully understand the connection between the changes they make and the impact these changes have on customer experience and business performance.
But by embracing an AIOps mindset—and leveraging an AI-powered APM solution—organizations can drive deep cross-domain visibility, insights and automation to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Introducing the Central Nervous System (CNS)
Similar to how the human central nervous system processes and interprets sensory input to decide what actions should be taken, the Central Nervous System (CNS) for IT—the new vision for AIOps from Cisco and AppDynamics—helps organizations sift through volumes of data to derive real-time insights and orchestrate targeted actions.
So, how are organizations using the CNS in their day-to-day IT practices to take advantage of AIOps use cases?
Three Real-World Applications of the CNS
The new Central Nervous System Use Case Guide details three practical ways enterprise IT teams are leveraging the combined power of AppDynamics and Cisco:
#1 – Intelligent Auto-Scaling
While IT teams need to keep a close watch over traffic and load to know when to scale an application up or down, many monitoring tools unfortunately require complex, manually intensive workflows.
With AppDynamics’ lightweight agent installed across the application ecosystem, metrics such as load, response time, and errors are automatically collected. These data points are then used to create a dynamic baseline and detect performance anomalies. And though its integration with Cisco Data Center products, when AppDynamics detects an anomaly, it correlates the app data with network metrics from Cisco ACI to identify root cause and recommend an action.
#2 – Automatic Workload Optimization
To benefit from easier deployment and scalability, 86 percent of enterprises today have adopted a multi-cloud strategy. But managing a multi-cloud or hybrid environment brings with it a new set of challenges.
To tame the resulting complexity, AppDynamics can be paired with Cisco’s Workload Optimization Manager (CWOM). Real-time performance insights from AppDynamics gets fed to CWOM, which can instantly scale resources up or down to alleviate or prevent performance issues. As a result, IT teams can optimize and orchestrate workloads, while also ensuring that infrastructure is never the cause of application performance problems.
#3 – Network Triage
Application and network teams too often operate in silos, which can lead to application slowdowns and longer outage-resolution times. Network engineers, for example, often have no application context when troubleshooting network performance issues, making it difficult to isolate the problem impacting end users.
Using AppDynamics with Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) provides an integrated application-to-network view—from code to underlying infrastructure—of business applications running across multiple clouds and data centers. This gives AppOps and NetOps admins visibility into the entire IT environment, making it easier and faster to identify root cause and troubleshoot the problem in the network.
Dave Wilson, senior director of IT infrastructure and architecture at Paychex, sums up the practical value his organization has seen from the CNS best: “Meeting the demands of our 650,000 customers by delivering a flawless digital experience is our team’s number one priority. However, as we adapt new technologies like AI, chatbots, and self-service tools, the complexity of these new technologies makes delivering that seamless experience to our millions of monthly users even more critical. AppDynamics and Cisco’s vision for the future helps provide a deeper level of visibility and insight into our application environments and can also take automated actions to swiftly improve our digital experience for users.”
Read the Guide
To dive deeper into these three practical applications of the CNS and learn how this powerful new platform can help you on your journey to AIOps, read the Central Nervous System Use Case Guide.