The power of the platform: Observability takes a seat at the boardroom table

Digital experience is the new boardroom KPI in a world where visibility and insight into application performance are now seen as critical to executives.

One year ago, at Cisco Live EMEA, I spoke about our vision for Cisco Full-Stack Observability. For those who were there, you will likely remember that our strategy has always been anchored in an architectural approach – a single platform, providing insights-driven services, linking application performance to business context with a goal of reducing tool sprawl, getting to root cause analysis (RCA) faster, and reducing the Mean Time to Innocence (MTTI) and breaking down the silos between teams, as they work towards delivering the best and most secure experience for customers, employees and partners.

Observability is essential to delivering a unified, simplified digital experience. It is key to assembling a holistic picture of the digital health of an organization, providing complete visibility into everything that the application is dependent on.

We have delivered on that vision with observability solutions for every use case requested by our customers (and then some) with Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco Observability Platform.

Deploying Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions has helped organizations recognize that their technology architecture is their business architecture. The benefits are real and measurable: Reduced friction among teams, unified data, improved operational efficiency, a better and more secure user experience, and lower business risk.

And customers and analysts agree. We were recently recognized by Gartner as a “Customers’ Choice” vendor for APM and Observability on Gartner® Peer Insights™, showing our ongoing commitment to serving our customers by addressing their current and future needs. ¹

In today’s experience economy, applications are key to business success and digital experience is increasingly seen as a critical metric. Business leaders increasingly scrutinize key performance indicators (KPIs) around application performance and demand greater visibility and insight into the business impact of digital experiences. The most recent Cisco Business Pulse survey reveals that digital experience has grown significantly in importance over the last three years for 75% of business leaders.

Organizations are turning to Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions to measure and improve user experience and other key business metrics. This week at Cisco Live EMEA, Petek Ergul, managing director and global head of CTO Service Management for HSBC, underscored the importance of the movement toward observability.

“Observability should enable technology to become more aligned and focused on customer outcomes, therefore should be closely tied into business defined SLOs. In recent years, we have made significant progress with uplifting our monitoring, alerting, and logging capabilities by introducing tools like Cisco AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, Splunk, and others. This helped us handle the complexity in the technology estate to some extent.”

—Petek Ergul, HSBC

Digital experience is the new C-level KPI

According to the Business Pulse research, most customer engagement is now via applications and digital services (52%) with nearly half (46%) of revenue coming through these channels. Their performance and impact on the business is now reported to c-level executives by 80% of organizations.

With Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions, deep cross-domain knowledge correlated with business objectives is an integral part of monitoring and visibility practices.

We continue to deepen and extend artificial intelligence (AI) in our product portfolio to make our observability capabilities stronger, simpler and more accessible to use. In the fall of 2023, we proudly delivered the ability to observe large language model (LLM) application programming interfaces (APIs) and calls. At Cisco Live EMEA this week, we are delighted to announce natural language interface for queries as well as our ability to drive AIOps on our Cisco Observability Platform. We will soon deliver GenAI Assistant for Summarization, speeding time to resolution for incidents with similar signatures.

This week we also introduced eight new solutions integrated with the Cisco Observability Platform, enhancing an already powerful observability paradigm, including Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) with Session Replay and Data Security Posture Management Observability (DSPMO).

Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions allow CIOs and their teams to be more prescriptive and productive using observability-derived telemetry which offers shared, common context around digital experiences. Observability KPIs clarify DevOps and development projects, influencing prioritization of digital transformation and business initiatives in the boardroom.

Reaching a boardroom “observability posture”

Digital experience KPIs can help c-suite executives build a unified view of security risks, compliance, governance, financial impact, and needed investment areas. As organizations adjust for macro-economic or operational efficiencies, observability insights can be a gauge for knowing if you’ve cut back too far.

During the Cisco Live EMEA keynote presentation, Petek Ergul explained another aspect of how Cisco Full-Stack Observability has helped refine HSBC’s technology strategy. Technology Resilience Maturity Framework (TRMF) is an in-house self-assessment tool developed by HSBC that leverages insights from the company’s observability portfolio.

“The great thing about TRMF is that it offers a common language that both business and technology colleagues can understand and based on the resiliency posture of business services, we can then make priority investment decisions,” she said.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions, through Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco Observability Platform, provide data-driven business insights that bring together IT leaders with c-suite executives around the boardroom table as true partners.

That’s vital in the experience economy, and Cisco is committed to helping our customers harness the power of observability to compete and succeed in this digital-first world.

Explore more Cisco Strategy, Incubation and Applications events.

Read the press release: Cisco Unveils New Innovations for Cisco Observability Platform

Go deeper — read: Bringing our Industry-Leading Innovation to Cisco Live EMEA

*Gartner Voice of the Customer for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability, Gartner, Inc., by Peer Contributors, December 29, 2023

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¹ Gartner, Gartner Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for Performance Monitoring and Observability

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