Partner POV | Unlocking End-to-End Observability: Cisco's Game-Changing Solution

This article was contributed and written by Courtney Dragoon, Product Marketing Manager at Cisco AppDynamics.

In today's digital landscape, business context is vital to every technology stack — helping to drive success through seamless application experiences. The rapid pace and intricate nature of application development demands a comprehensive understanding of their performance — one that allows IT teams, security teams and business leaders to connect the dots between functionality and tangible business outcomes. To meet the increasing demand, it is essential to have a scalable platform that can grow alongside businesses, seamlessly integrating into their infrastructure and application life cycle. And to provide employees, business partners and customers with optimal experiences, leaders must possess complete visibility, contextual insights and granular control.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability (FSO) is our answer to these challenges. Our solution moves beyond domain-specific monitoring into full-stack visibility, insights and action. It connects all of this with business context and breaks down silos by correlating real-time telemetry across multiple domains, so organizations can effectively deliver always-on, secure and exceptional digital experiences for customers and employees.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability is open, extensible, scalable and flexible. It combines the unprecedented capabilities of Cisco networking intelligence, security insights, application observability and our best-in-class partner ecosystem. It brings together IT, security and business leaders to deliver on use cases such as digital experience monitoring, hybrid cost/workload optimization and application security; all with an open, programmable and API-driven approach.

A new era of Digital Experience Monitoring

Cisco offers Customer Digital Experience Monitoring (CDEM) that combines world-class application, infrastructure, network monitoring and user experience tools. Our bi-directional integration of Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes allows users to quickly identify gaps in monitoring and deliver optimal digital experiences to their customers proactively. This integration offers real-time network and cloud infrastructure metrics correlated with application data, visible within AppDynamics. With bi-directional information sharing between APM and NPM, this solution eliminates silos and provides end-to-end visibility to every team, all from within Cisco AppDynamics.

This combined visibility enables businesses to provide better customer experiences, and the deeper integration reduces the learning curve for IT teams, allowing more people to utilize the value of the combined solution. Businesses can reduce the time taken to identify internet misrouting as the root cause of poor user experience and enable ITOps teams to fill observability gaps. This solution makes it easier for IT teams to gain a shared understanding of digital experience. How? Let's look at some real-world examples:

Transform Application and Developer Operations

Say it's Monday morning and a UX issue is reported, the first step in diagnosing is usually ruling out network performance concerns. However, this can be a blind spot for application monitoring teams due to their lack of visibility and expertise in this area. That's where our integration comes in. Network insights are embedded in user experience troubleshooting dashboards to quickly identify any network impact. By selecting geo-specific tests, root causes can be narrowed down for faster resolution.

Creating network tests to prevent future issues often requires specialized knowledge, but with our new dependency mapping feature, ThousandEyes will recommend tests for applications with unmonitored network dependencies. Coupled with pre-configured test templates, the process is as simple as it gets. These tests help increase end-to-end visibility and close observability gaps, with new tests correlated to their applications for faster time-to-value.

For AppOps and DevOps teams, real-time ingestion of network metrics and embedded network intelligence data from ThousandEyes within AppDynamics helps correlate business results with application, network and internet performance in a single place and help resolve issues faster.

Insights for Network Operations

Imagine a scenario where the network is experiencing packet loss, but the application remains in good health. With our bi-directional integration, teams can take immediate action to address the network problem before it affects the application's performance or user experience. Similarly, if an application health issue arises, operators can prioritize remediation efforts for the most affected applications, ensuring that critical systems are given the highest priority.

Network operations teams aspire to be proactive and closely aligned with the business, yet often lack the necessary visibility to understand how network problems impact application health. Now, network operations teams can gain shared visibility into application health through intuitive dashboards that align health indicators across products. This enables them to swiftly assess the business impact of infrastructure-related issues. In addition, ThousandEyes provides real-time application dependency mapping data from Cisco AppDynamics, streamlining network test creation and correlation with actionable test recommendations and pre-configured templates.

With our bi-directional integration, network operations teams gain shared visibility into application health, enabling proactive measures to be taken before health is impacted. With dashboards that align health indicators across products, infrastructure-related issues can be quickly identified and prioritized for remediation.

End-to-end Observability

This announcement continues to build on Cisco's commitment to enhancing its Full-Stack Observability offer by bringing together multiple domains into common workflows for full-stack visibility, insights and action. It unlocks comprehensive digital experience monitoring and contributes towards Cisco's ultimate vision of delivering full-stack observability to businesses. The result is expanded visibility, operational efficiency and the ability to optimize positive customer experiences. The benefits to teams are massive, including:

• Reducing MTTR by correlating network insights with application insights.
• Streamlining workflows by providing actionable recommendations with pre-configured test templates.
• Prioritizing network remediation based on business impact.

"By bringing together application observability and network intelligence data, we will have full visibility of our business-critical applications. It is changing our culture for the better — enabling us to shift from a reactive organization to a proactive, predictive organization."  – Alice McElroy, Director of Operational Excellence at Royal Caribbean Group