Observability in today’s complex application environment requires cross-domain business insight and context

Modern enterprises use anywhere from 10 to 100 monitoring and observability tools according to IDC. Tool sprawl and lack of visibility are real, with solutions that do not integrate well in multi-vendor, distributed environments. So are the challenges of collecting, managing, and analyzing data-driven insights related to the application stack.

“Teams and processes that support applications are deeply siloed, and lack essential business context,” said Liz Centoni, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer, and GM of Applications at Cisco. “Cisco Full-Stack Observability (FSO) reduces friction and unifies data, actions, and processes to enable truly flawless digital experiences at scale.”

Cisco recently delivered the Cisco FSO Platform which offers a new observability ecosystem across the enterprise. The platform empowers teams to deliver secure, reliable, and exceptional digital experiences with a single source of truth to proactively identify and fix any issues across the stack.

Harnessing the power of the company’s full portfolio, the Cisco FSO Platform leverages OpenTelemetry to deliver contextual and predictive insights that are directly correlated to business outcomes. Teams can quickly identify, prioritize, and resolve issues across the entire multi-cloud environment and the full technology stack from applications and their dependencies – networking, infrastructure, security, and the Internet.

The platform enables extensibility from queries, data ingestion pipelines, and entity models all the way to application programming interfaces (APIs) and a composable UI framework. It also allows developers to build their own observability solutions that natively correlate and integrate with other telemetry-based signals and platform modules. It equips developers with a seamless extension of Cisco’s entity-centric model, allowing them to standardize, ingest, and analyze telemetry data generated by any source – not just applications and hosts.

“We’re delivering an extensible ecosystem enabler that gives teams a rich set of solutions that cut through the chaos and achieve more clarity,” said Centoni.

Cloud Native Application Observability
 Cisco’s observability solution for cloud-native application architectures, Cisco Cloud Native Application Observability (CNAO), is the premier solution on Cisco FSO Platform. It helps customers elevate business outcomes and context, so they make the right digital experience-related decisions. This helps ensure application performance aligns with the demands of both end-users and business key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue, risk, growth, and delivery time.

Several modules are now available on Cisco FSO Platform, designed to work with Cloud Native Application Observability. They include:

• Cost Insights from Cisco – Provides visibility and insights into application-level costs alongside performance metrics to help businesses understand the fiscal impact of their cloud applications.
• Application Resource Optimizer from Cisco – An optimization solution that delivers deeper insights into Kubernetes workloads.
• Security Insights from Cisco – A business risk scoring solution that enables technology teams to generate an application-based business risk score to help DevOps and SecOps teams to prioritize and eliminate vulnerabilities.
• Cisco AIOps – A visualization of contextualized data relevant to infrastructure, incidents, hosts, network, and performance of a hybrid-cloud application, all in one place.

Cisco FSO Platform also integrates with third-party systems, including CloudFabrix, Evolutio, and Kanari, who are also extending the reach of the platform to new customers and new business use cases.
 
Gartner forecasts that by next year, more than 30% of enterprises with distributed, cloud-native architectures will have adopted observability to drive their digital business transformation. And this figure will continue to grow as applications more-and-more become the front door for businesses of every shape and size. Much like Cisco defined the modern internet with networking, Cisco FSO Platform is helping companies build and deliver application experiences and reimagine the applications of tomorrow.