Maximizing Operational Efficiency: Introducing our New Smart Agent Management for Cisco AppDynamics

Application performance monitoring (APM) remains a key pillar of any observability strategy. Overwhelmed IT Infra and Ops teams rely on for the powerful application and business insights they need to deliver flawless digital experiences to their end users. The challenge they face from the scale of an application’s APM deployments can be complex and difficult to maintain — costing teams time that could be better served focusing on business KPIs.

Turn maintenance time to innovation time

Cisco continuously looks at every opportunity to use automation and intelligence to give time back to our customers, with a full commitment to helping our customers reduce the stress and inefficiency caused by the ever-growing complexity of technologists’ IT environments. I’m pleased to share a major innovation in the Cisco Full-Stack Observability portfolio: Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics, which enables simplified full-stack application instrumentation and centralized agent lifecycle management.

Simplified agent management – focus on what matters most

An average sized organization may have upward of 40,000 agents in deployment, but I’ve even spoken with some larger organizations with more than one million agents to support massively scalable applications! Keeping all those agents updated to the latest version can be complicated and time consuming and takes away critical manpower from actually managing application performance.

But the business impacts can be even greater. Security risks can occur at any time, and to keep your IT environments safe, it is critical to maintain good agent management and version compliance. Failure to do so can expose teams to unnecessary risks that may have otherwise been resolved in the latest agent releases.

Good agent management also allows you to take advantage of the latest innovations released each month.  New features can provide powerful new insights, but taking advantage of these requires environments to be updated with the latest agents. This isn’t possible unless you have a structured and automated approach to agent management!

How we made it simple

Cisco is making it easier than ever for customers to manage their agent fleets with the introduction of Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics with centralized agent lifecycle management, which allows you to onboard new applications faster, quickly identify out-of-date agents, and easily conduct upgrades. What may have once taken many hours of manual instrumentation now just requires a few minutes and clicks.

Smart Agent is deployed on each host, allowing teams to remotely install and upgrade Cisco AppDynamics agents from a centralized agent management console with just a few clicks. The console flags agents that are old and outdated, and easily allows IT teams to select them and push upgrades without coding or scripts. Users can also install new agents directly from the agent management console when instrumenting new applications. There’s no need for manual intervention —teams can now focus on what matters for the business and react quickly to security events or take advantage of new agent-based functionality.

Our dedication to simplification

Agent lifecycle automation is just the first step in our journey toward simplification for our customers. Soon, Smart Agent will be able to automatically instrument new applications with a single-agent installation utilizing intelligent auto-detect and auto-deploy capabilities, guided by Smart Agent policies, to determine which agents are needed, and then automatically download, install, and configure only those agents needed. Smart Agent will reduce instrumentation time from hours/days to minutes.

Today’s pace of innovation requires teams to be agile and adjust quickly to changes. With Smart Agent, Cisco is helping customers keep up, reduce operational costs, and focus on what matters most to their business and teams.

You can also register for our upcoming webinar on February 14:

​​​​​​Simplify agent lifecycle management with Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics

Resources

Press release:  Cisco transforms application instrumentation with Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics

AppDynamics on DevNet: Find resources for application developers to help build web and mobile applications with deep performance visibility

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