The Cisco Observability Platform is the right solution at the right time

Every enterprise needs visibility into its tech stack. Our platform, augmented by Cisco Partners, helps IT professionals select the right solutions for their specific needs.

At Cisco AppDynamics, we live by one core belief: Full-stack observability (FSO) is the key to delivering amazing customer experiences.

Visibility at every level of the technology stack is essential to rapidly identifying and mitigating problems before they impact end users. However, observability is also crucial to enhancing productivity, optimizing infrastructure, reducing risk, and managing costs. As the enterprise tech stack grows increasingly complex, the breadth and depth of full-stack observability solutions need to keep pace.

When I talk to our partners and customers about the technology challenges they face, they invariably mention three things:

• They’re overwhelmed by IT complexity
• They seek clarity and security within these systems
• They need a single source of truth to drive business decisions

Despite these common concerns, different enterprises will approach these challenges in different ways. Even in an organization as large and sophisticated as Cisco, we don’t have the resources to address every specific use case. But every enterprise needs the ability to observe and monitor each component of its IT stack, harden its security, and lower costs by optimizing its operations.

That’s why we launched the Cisco Observability Platform—an open, extensible ecosystem that combines Cisco’s technological prowess with our partners’ deep subject matter expertise and uniquely innovative approaches. The result is a scalable catalog of solutions that can address virtually any use case.

The response from our partners has been nothing short of phenomenal. Since the launch of the Cisco Observability Platform last June, our partners have built nearly a module a week, including the eight new modules we announced last month. And as the Cisco FSO ecosystem continues to evolve, that growth trajectory will accelerate. Over the next twelve months, we’ll be introducing exciting new modules from even more partners.

An open and extensible platform

One of the keys to building a successful platform is support for open standards. That’s why we incorporated OpenTelemetry™ (OTel) into the Cisco Observability Platform, making it easy to capture metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) from cloud-native technologies. These universally supported protocols allow our development partners to address a virtually unlimited number of use cases.

Today, these Cisco- and partner-owned modules run the gamut from optimizing data center operations to measuring the carbon footprint of your cloud infrastructure. Some are specific to certain industries, like manufacturing, e-commerce, or oil and gas. Others are broadly applicable across virtually every enterprise, offering visibility into user behavior on web and mobile platforms, policy and regulatory compliance, potential security incidents, cloud operating expenses, and AI operations.

However, all of these modules ultimately address the three core themes (observe, secure, and optimize) central to FSO.

Observe

When application performance degrades, everyone suffers. But before you can troubleshoot, you need to observe how your apps operate in real-time. A sophisticated FSO solution allows you to trace app behavior across multiple networks, clouds, and microservices to identify points of failure.

For example, The London School of Economics deployed an FSO solution that enabled it to seamlessly enroll 12,000 students from around the globe with zero downtime and no errors. Using Cisco AppDynamics’ Application Performance Monitoring (APM) module, LSE’s tech team was able to anticipate potential bottlenecks and reduce average web page load times from 15 seconds to milliseconds.

Secure

Cyber-attacks are inevitable. But the faster you can identify and assess the threat, the less likely it is to spread and wreak havoc on your network. FSO lets you focus on the threats most likely to impact your business and neutralize them quickly.

Security is especially important when you’re storing the sensitive personal information of 7 million constituents. The Indiana Office of Technology maintains systems for over 90 state agencies, using Cisco AppDynamics, Cisco ThousandEyes, and Cisco Secure Application to keep its mission-critical apps running smoothly and securely. The ability to detect and defend against attacks in real-time helps agencies be more resilient, ensuring the secure 24/7 access to data that citizens require.

Optimize

Businesses that are better at managing costs and optimizing resources enjoy a considerable advantage over their competition. FSO solutions allow enterprises to maximize workload efficiency while closely monitoring cloud spending.

Frankly, one of the reasons we’re such enthusiastic evangelists for observability is that we’ve seen the results with our own eyes. We use the Cisco Observability Platform, Cisco AppDynamics, and Cisco ThousandEyes to gain visibility and insight across Cisco’s entire IT stack, then use that data to measure the impact of tech issues on the business. Our AIOps practice has allowed us to achieve “five nines” availability for IT services and applications, enjoy a 38-percent reduction in mean-time-to-restore for critical infrastructure issues, and reduce business-critical impacts by 80 percent.

The bottom line is that observability really works—and it’s more crucial to the enterprise than ever. At Cisco, we wouldn’t think of operating without it.

Custom operations for every enterprise

The world of enterprise technology is vast and differentiated. Direct competitors within the same industry may vary significantly in their approaches to people, processes, and technologies. Even when facing similar problems, they may need to address them uniquely. That’s what our observability platform is built to address as it continues to expand and evolve.

What truly differentiates the Cisco Observability Platform from its competition is the depth of its solutions, the speed of its evolution, and the breadth of its innovation. As more FSO solutions roll out, we’ll be able to tackle even more enterprise pain points on a global scale.

None of this would be possible without the help of our partners, who continue to amaze us with their creativity and passion. I would personally like to thank the partners who’ve helped make the Cisco Observability Platform a stunning success in such a short time. By increasing visibility across the IT stack, their FSO modules can help businesses cut costs, streamline operations, improve security, and ensure better experiences for all of their customers.

Learn more about how the Cisco Observability Platform
can help optimize your enterprise IT stack.

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