Beyond visibility, there’s observability

Organizations are shifting to observability over the entire application stack to achieve exceptional, secure, performant digital experiences

Whether managing supply chains, transferring funds, delivering medical services, collaborating with geographically dispersed teams, or streaming the latest movies, today’s hyper-connected users expect highly personalized and secure digital experiences that work every time, everywhere.

Applications are the face of nearly every modern organization as they deliver products or services. Reliance on cloud-enabled and modern applications means that business experiences are synonymous with digital experiences. Flawless application performance and seamless security are baseline expectations.

At stake are revenue, reputation, brand promise, and business relevance.

The stakes have never been higher

Virtually every organization now depends upon applications to deliver digital experiences. Modern applications are built on top of microservices running on cloud architectures, which are based on massively decentralized services. This creates a complex and fast-evolving environment where a minor issue in one service can have a cumulative effect on overall application performance.

When something goes wrong, it can take hours or even days to identify, analyze, and triage the root cause simply because there are so many dependencies and potential points of failure across multiple domains and environments.

The information and experience required to operate these environments is scattered and siloed across different tools and teams. This reduces the ability to identify, prioritize, and effectively address the issues that directly impact user experience – and ultimately brand and reputation.

At the same time, the attack surface is growing exponentially with many possible entry points and potentially misconfigured services and infrastructure. Malicious actors have become more sophisticated, overwhelming IT and security teams.

With so much on the line, there is little room for error and time is critical. Teams work hard to stay on top of both performance and security, often using multiple monitoring tools to see and make sense of what’s happening within their environment and across the entire application stack.

The age of observability has arrived

This situation is enormously challenging. According to IDC, 47% of businesses report using between 11 and 40 different monitoring tools while only 17% say their current approach meets their monitoring and observability requirements.

The sheer volume of alerts generated by distinct monitoring systems can be overwhelming, leading to “alert fatigue” that can result in critical information being overlooked. Alerts are also siloed, lacking the business context that would allow teams to prioritize threats according to the risk and impact posed to the business.

With so many tools, businesses face a high total cost of ownership (TCO) for what they have available, while still experiencing lengthy mean time to detect (MTTD) across domains and mean time to resolution (MTTR) when issues arise. That is because those same monitoring tools cannot correlate issues in a way that supports actionable remediation.

Observability brings a wider scope to the equation. An evolution beyond monitoring, it is the process of understanding the internal states and behaviors of a complex system, such as applications, by gathering, evaluating, and visualizing pertinent data from diverse sources.

Nearly three-quarters of respondents to an IDC survey say observability solutions must provide a single source of truth for use by all mission-critical IT management tools and teams. Sharing context among teams – IT operations, DevOps, SecOps, NetOps, site reliability engineers (SREs), line of business, and even the C-suite – is critical to delivering flawless digital experiences.

However, there are numerous barriers to observability. For example, a recent IDC report indicates that 60% of IT professionals are concerned that most observability tools are too narrowly focused and fail to give them a complete view into current and trending operating conditions. Additionally, 65% say they want a programmable and extensible observability solution that can be leveraged for use cases specific to their environment.

This calls for a platform that scales as businesses scale and easily extends across the infrastructure and lifecycle of their applications. A platform-centric approach must first support application performance monitoring (APM) for hybrid and cloud native apps to establish a foundation for observability.

Organizations can then leverage native and open integrations and extensions for digital experience monitoring, business risk observability, cost and workload optimization, AIOps, and DevSecOps, for instance, to help teams deliver the best application experiences.

From monitoring to observability to full-stack observability

The concept of observability over the “full stack” – full-stack observability – has emerged as a potent new category with the goal of enabling organizations to aggregate and correlate data across environments and domains.

Full-stack observability offers comprehensive monitoring, tracking, and analysis of applications, their dependencies and related infrastructure across all layers and components to gain real-time insights into their performance, risks, and behavior.

It strives to aggregate and correlate data from across operational domains — including applications, networking, multicloud infrastructure and cloud services, security, end users, and business itself. It then surfaces recommended actions enriched with business context, enabling teams across multiple domains to proactively identify, prioritize, and resolve issues to deliver always-on, secure, and exceptional digital experiences.

Making complex systems and applications observable in this way empowers technology and operations teams to effectively see around corners, achieving swift resolution that mitigates disruption, or even avoids it altogether. It helps them wrap their arms around everything that can impact any user experience when customers, employees, or partners are engaging with their applications.

Cisco’s answer is Cisco Full-Stack Observability. For this, Cisco has taken a platform approach. Cisco Observability Platform aggregates and correlates data from across operational domains — including applications, networking, multicloud infrastructure and cloud services, security, end users, and business itself.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability offers comprehensive monitoring, tracking, and analysis of applications, their dependencies and related infrastructure across all layers and components to gain real-time insights into their performance, risks, and behavior. It then surfaces recommended actions enriched with business context, enabling teams across multiple domains to proactively identify, prioritize, and resolve issues to deliver always-on, secure, and exceptional digital experiences.

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