Presented by Cisco AppDynamics

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Across industries, and in the wake of the pandemic, companies report that they’ve been able to slash digital development time from years to months, weeks, and even days, making the ability to deliver best-in-class user experiences a bigger competitive advantage than ever.

“While many organizations still run their mission-critical and revenue-generating systems with traditional applications, the pandemic and hybrid work have accelerated the move toward devops initiatives for modern business apps,” Joe Byrne, Executive CTO, Cisco AppDynamics says. “This trend has made it easier for IT teams to deliver exceptional digital service, spawning an end-to-end experience revolution among consumers and end users.”

According to the recent AppDynamics report, “The Journey to Observability,” 96% of technologists say being able to monitor their entire IT stack, and directly link performance-to-business outcomes, is the key to ensuring first-class digital experiences. And 79% understand that the technology decisions they make directly impact the performance of the business.

Unfortunately, deep, end-to-end visibility across an application ecosystem is tremendously complicated — in today’s modern business, there’s never been more going on under the hood.

The modern IT (hay) stack

“To deliver the consistent, reliable digital experiences that consumers and end users now demand, IT teams must monitor and manage a dynamic set of application dependencies across a mix of infrastructure, microservices, containers and APIs using home-grown IT stacks, multiple clouds, SaaS services and security solutions,” says Byrne. “Some traditional monitoring approaches break down in this vastly complex and dynamic ecosystem.”

To scale, companies are leaning on cloud-native technology, as well as distributed infrastructures with microservices and containerized components. Technologists are leveraging more third-party services, like SaaS applications and public internet gateways, to optimize the end-user experience for their applications.

At the same time, potential security vulnerabilities are a constant, ongoing issue for highly distributed and cloud-based solutions, making managing the application landscape even more complex. And because the modern application stack is distributed, narrowing down the underlying cause of application performance issues can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Cutting through noise to identify what’s going on is a significant challenge, 85% of technologists say.

Achieving full-stack observability

Full-stack observability is the secret to digital transformation, enabling teams to pivot quickly in the face of IT issues, and deliver flawless customer experiences. It enables real-time observability across the modern technology stack, from applications and software-defined computers, to storage, services, network and more. It offers in-depth visibility into the behavior, performance and health of the app and supporting infrastructure via high-fidelity telemetry collected from the entire IT estate. IT can pinpoint underlying issues in real time, from third-party APIs down to the code level.

With deep, end-to-end visibility across an application ecosystem, operational silos can be broken down. And with aligned IT teams, technologists can proactively address problems before they ever affect performance, prioritizing issues based on user and business impact. And it lets companies take a good hard look at infrastructure cost and performance with critical key business metrics like conversions, to resolve issues before they impact the bottom line.

“By centralizing and correlating application performance analytics across the full stack, IT teams can better collaborate to isolate issues and optimize application experiences,” Byrne says. “The ability to monitor all technical areas across their IT stack and directly link performance-to-business outcomes is now essential to delivering first-class digital experiences.”

Leveraging cloud-native observability

With the complexity of distributed architectures and underlying services growing in leaps and bounds, observability platforms need to keep pace. In fact, Cisco AppDynamics recently launched AppDynamics Cloud, a cloud-native observability platform designed to optimize cloud-native applications.

AppDynamics Cloud ingests telemetry data generated across the entire IT stack to deliver actionable insights into application performance and security. It offers flexibility, choice and agility to develop and deploy applications and enhance the digital experience.

The platform enables collaboration across teams including devops, site reliability engineers (SREs) and other business stakeholders to achieve common benchmarks like service-level objectives (SLOs) and organizational KPIs. AppDynamics Cloud users can use supported services from AWS and Azure to develop and deploy API-first applications that enhance and expand the digital experience.

AppDynamics Cloud ingests the deluge of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) generated in this environment — including network, databases, storage, containers, security and cloud services — to make sense of the current state of the entire IT stack all the way to the end user. Actions can then be taken to optimize costs, maximize transaction revenue and secure user and organizational data.

Current AppDynamics customers can upgrade to AppDynamics Cloud and leverage their existing application performance monitoring (APM) agents, or feed both solutions concurrently. The platform supports cloud-native, managed Kubernetes environments on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with future expansion to Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and other cloud providers.

To register your interest, contact Cisco AppDynamics sales here. For further information about AppDynamics Cloud,go here. 

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