Cisco is blending its AppDynamics application observability and ThousandEyes network intelligence in a new OpenTelemetry (OTEL)-based full-stack observability strategy for customer digital experience monitoring (CDEM). That’s a mouthful, so let’s break down what this move means for cloud network architects.
Holistically viewing cloud-hosted applications, services and infrastructure is crucial for an IT environment. Full-stack observability, as the name implies, provides a real-time overview of the status of the entire technology stack.
Cisco wants to build on the concept of full-stack observability to encompass what organizations are already prioritizing — the ability to monitor customer digital experience.
A seamless application experience is a top priority for organizations today, according to Cisco, who reported 84% of technologists believe business application performance is now more important than ever.
Plus, 85% of respondents to the same survey reported that full-stack observability is core to sustainable transformation and innovation, with 71% agreeing their organization will need to focus on investment on observing cloud-native apps and infrastructure, according to the vendor.
Leveraging OTEL for full-stack
But equipping organizations with the tools needed to monitor myriad applications strewn throughout cloud-native and hybrid cloud architectures is hard in a decentralized environment. “As digital experiences get simpler for the consumers, they get more complex for companies,” Liz Centoni, Cisco’s EVP, chief strategy officer and GM of applications. said in a press release.
Cisco will use OpenTelemetry to update its application observability and network intelligence to bridge that gap, Carlos Pereira, Cisco fellow and chief architect of strategy, applications, emerging technologies and incubation, told Silverlinings in an email. OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project to which Cisco has been a leading contributor in the last year.
“OpenTelemetry (OTEL) has made it possible to normalize ingestion of telemetry data (metrics, events, logs and traces) in an open and standard way,” wrote Pereira. “If there is an user-experience issue or incident, the [customer digital experience monitoring] CDEM use-case from Cisco Full-Stack Observability (FSO) enables proper real-time triage as to where the issue is sourced (versus where it’s not), ideally before it impacts the business.”
Pereira claims the customer digital experience monitoring use-case delivers a bi-directional integration of hybrid multi-cloud applications observability and network intelligence. Melding these capabilities could allow organizations to close observability gaps by flagging issues early.
“Customers want to see a single, intuitive solution. So, building one solution that encompasses different personas — Infrastructure & Operations teams, from applications to networking — helps to bridge the divide and helps maintain [organizations’] operations procedures,” wrote Pereira.
Cisco claims its enhanced use-case of CDEM can improve the user experience, mainly through reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and by improving team alignment. It says it can achieve the latter by breaking down silos between application monitoring and network monitoring teams, allowing teams to work together more efficiently.