Cisco to buy Epsagon for application, microservice management

Cisco is looking to bolster its enterprise application management suite by buying cloud-based application-performance firm Epsagon for $500M.

Founded in 2017, the Israel-based Epsagon develops cloud-based application monitoring software focused on scrutinizing cloud microservices and applications.

Businesses are adopting cloud-native technologies, microservices, and containerized components on a large scale while leveraging an extensive web of traditional components, third-party services and application programming interfaces, wrote Liz Centoni, Cisco’s chief strategy officer and general manager, applications, in a blog about the acquisition.   

“This has led to a significant increase in complexity in IT environments,” Centoni stated.  “Multiple teams are involved in figuring out how to monitor the performance, optimization and security of every digital experience, by examining each component, such as application services, networks, infrastructure, cloud and databases, and understanding the insights gathered and their impact to customers’ digital experiences. Traditional domain-centric monitoring tools address only some of these needs and for a single area at a time,” Centoni stated.

This is where integrated Epsagon technology and Cisco’s full-stack application management suite, which includes AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, and Intersight, will come into play as it will let IT teams monitor and troubleshoot app and microservice environments, Cisco says.

The Cisco management suite that Epsagon will bolster includes Cisco’s AppDynamics performance-management platform, which uses a series of agents and controllers to monitor the performance of application code, runtime, and behavior. Agents are deployed across the enterprise on devices, containers, and host-application locations.

AppDynamics uses AI and machine learning to correlate information from across different domains to better understand application performance and infrastructure dependencies and quickly identify problems. The system supports analytics to help IT teams understand why things are not working optimally, analyze the root causes, and predict when problems will occur.

ThousandEyes software analyzes performance of local and wide-area networks and the internet. By utilizing its world-wide system of software and agents, it provides insights into cloud, enterprise, and endpoint services that can let network, application, and cloud teams work together to quickly isolate and resolve problems  Cisco recently added a ThousandEyes agent to its Catalyst 9300 and 9400 Series switches that monitors performance of applications and network components on campus and branch-office networks.

The last piece of the management suite is Cisco’s Intersight, the company’s cloud-based systems-management offering, which includes the ability to manage Kubernetes containers. The idea is with Intersight Kubernetes Service, infrastructure teams can automate the lifecycle management of Kubernetes and containerized applications across any environment, Cisco says.

It supports observability across the entire stack of applications, network infrastructure and security with real-time insights correlated across domains and integrated with business context powered by AI and machine learning, Centoni stated.

“This gives all the involved teams full visibility across the stack so they can take quick actions. Teams are then able to tie performance back to core business metrics and prioritize actions based on business impact,” she stated.

Epsagon is Cisco’s fifth acquisition this year, including industrial-IoT expertise from Fluidmesh, vulnerability management from Kenna Security, and software-defined networking from Sedona Systems.

When the acquisition closes, Epsagon will be part of Cisco’s Strategy, Incubation and Applications group.