Innovation in the Age of Application Observability

Just weeks ago at Cisco Live, we shared with the world the general availability of the Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform. This marked a huge milestone in our strategy and dedication to meet customers’ observability needs as they continue to innovate at speed. We also marked the release of our bi-directional integration between ThousandEyes and AppDynamics, something customers had been really excited to see. And since its launch, it’s become clear during my customer meetings that people love the recent product and features that Cisco is bringing to the table.

There’s no question that innovation is critically important to our customers and technologists, as they look to implement new application innovations at a faster pace than ever before. However, alongside this innovation comes new challenges. As they build and release new technologies, organizations are implementing cloud native technologies right next to their existing on-premises applications and infrastructure, creating hybrid environments that are very difficult to navigate. 

In our latest research report, The Age of Application Observability, we uncovered some of the difficulties that these complex, hybrid environments bring. Here are the top three that resonated with me:  

• Manual monitoring is no longer an option: Rapid adoption of cloud native technologies brings overwhelming volumes of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) data into the IT department. Technologists can no longer manage this data by hand; 78% say the increased volume of data from hybrid environments is making manual monitoring impossible.  
• Security threats are obscured by disparate monitoring tools: Most technologists —89%!— are finding the shift to hybrid environments is creating a challenge with more entry points for security attacks and bigger cybersecurity threats, and most IT departments are still deploying separate tools to monitor on-premises and cloud native applications, meaning they have no clear line of sight of the entire application path across hybrid environments.
• Silos aren’t just a technology problem, they’re a retention issue: Modern applications require new teams with different skillsets than traditional applications, like site reliability engineers, DevOps, and CloudOps teams. But now, 80% of technologists report that this has created new silos between IT teams. Not only does this create difficulties in identifying and triaging problems, but we found that 84% of technologists either predict talent will leave or have already experienced talent leaving the business due to frustrating silos within the IT department

It is clearly urgent for organizations and technologists to take action to manage the volume of data in their environments, ensure they are protecting themselves and their customers from attacks, while also supporting their teams to break down the silos in their organizations. Application observability is rightfully a strategic priority in 85% of organizations to help them get in front of these new issues.  

Cisco is uniquely positioned to help our customers address these needs. As a leading provider of Application Observability and Application Performance Monitoring technology, AppDynamics helps customers observe what matters inside and beyond their IT environments. Combined with the power of Cisco, AppDynamics enables organizations to deliver exceptional user experiences by centralizing and correlating data into contextualized insights of key business metrics – providing them with the power to prioritize actions based on business needs.     

To read the full research, download the report, The Age of Application Observability.

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