Cisco accelerates its full-stack observability strategy

Cisco has announced a new OpenTelemetry-based integration of Cisco AppDynamics application observability and ThousandEyes network intelligence. This integration is bi-directional, with data exchanged simultaneously between both solutions in real time.

User experience has increasingly become a key performance indicator at the boardroom level. Organisations are working to ensure they can elevate digital experiences at scale via the applications at the heart of all business interactions today. That said, user experience can be impacted by many factors. The key is to find the root cause of the impact as soon as possible and address the issue before it reaches the end user and hurts the overall performance of the application and, ultimately, the business. 

Cisco's solution provides insights into the application and the network, with internet connectivity metrics for application operations and real-time application dependency mapping for network operations. The solution is automatically available without further installations, drives powerful customer digital experience monitoring from the combined application and network vantage points, and delivers differentiated business outcomes. It significantly reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR), closes observability gaps with actionable recommendations and helps teams prioritise network remediation based on business impact/criticality. 

"Our customers are committed to delivering the best digital experiences for their businesses. However, as digital experiences get simpler for the consumers, they get more complex for companies," says Liz Centoni, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer and GM of Applications at Cisco. "Customer digital experience monitoring seamlessly brings together our industry leading application observability and our unparalleled network intelligence, so that customers can uncover all the application and network dependencies not visible before." 

Cisco's customer digital experience monitoring solution also allows organisations to break down the barriers to meaningful collaboration between infrastructure and operations teams, application developers, and SecOps and DevSecOps teams; all of whom now need to work more closely together to ensure success. This helps organisations move fast and focus on what matters most – driving revenue, elevating user experience, managing risk, and reducing costs while reducing tool sprawl. 

The ability of companies to get a complete picture of their applications' health and users' journeys positions businesses to make better-informed decisions and resolve issues quicker, ultimately leading to better user experience and improved business outcomes. 

This bi-directional integration further strengthens Cisco's ability to deliver world-class customer digital experience monitoring, especially when coupled with the real user monitoring (RUM) that Smartlook offers. 

In April, Cisco announced the intention to acquire Smartlook, which excels at analysing and contextualising end-user digital behaviour. Smartlook, the bi-directional integration and the innovations Cisco continue to fulfil customers' expectations to enjoy end-to-end monitoring of an experience for users accessing applications and services hosted anywhere from any location using any device.

"Cisco remains committed to simplifying the buying experience as well. In February Cisco Business Risk Observability was launched and is included in the Cisco FSO Essentials bundle, which also includes critical full stack observability capabilities," adds Centoni. 

"In addition, the company is also announcing the Cisco FSO Advantage bundle. This bundle adds real-time ingestion of network intelligence metrics into application observability and real-time application dependencies for network operations. It offer helps customers deliver the end-to-end visibility, correlated insights, and recommended actions, tied to business context, across application monitoring, application security, the network and the internet. Only Cisco can combine the required vantage points of applications, networking and security at scale that can power true full stack observability."