Cisco Full Stack Observability: Now With Stronger Digital Experience Monitoring

The tech giant announces a new OpenTelemetry-based integration of Cisco AppDynamics application observability and ThousandEyes network intelligence as the company continues to prioritize full-stack observability.

Carlos Pereira, Cisco fellow and chief architect, strategy, emerging technologies, incubation and applications

Cisco Systems has revealed a new OpenTelemetry-based integration of Cisco AppDynamics application observability and ThousandEyes network intelligence so partners and end customers can determine if a performance problem is stemming from the network or application faster and using less tools.

The integration is bi-directional, with data exchanged simultaneously between both solutions in real time. It means that two customer use cases will immediately benefit, including application dependency monitoring and digital experience monitoring (DEM), a priority for Cisco right now as part of its full-stack observability push, according to the company.

The Cisco Customer DEM offering lets partner and business infrastructure and operations teams, application developers, SecOps and DevSecOps teams collaborate better by using a “single source of truth.” These groups need to work more closely than ever before, Carlos Pereira, Cisco fellow and chief architect, strategy, emerging technologies, incubation and applications, told CRN.

“We believe that OpenTelemetry is going to be a standard for data ingestion, so we can bring [the data] in, and then contextualize. After contextualizing, you can do correlation that drives insights and those insights will trigger actions,” Pereira said. “We have a full-stack observability platform that allows it to ingest telemetry in real time as streaming telemetry on the OpenTelemetry platform.”

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Full-stack observability is a growing trend and increasingly, a customer demand. IT administrators monitor across their own domains, like infrastructure, networking or application performance. The problem with that is too many tools because each environment requires their own. The integration will not only help business move fast and focus on user experience, but it will also help them combat tool sprawl and reduce costs, he said.

And while the key performance indicator for businesses used to be availability, it’s now shifted to experience, Pereira said. “Now, everybody’s connected. Everything has been digitized and the pandemic just accelerated that motion more than anything,” he said.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company in April revealed plans to buy Smartlook, a provider of qualitative analytics for websites and mobile apps, to boost Cisco’s application performance monitoring software business AppDynamics’ DEM.

The new bi-directional integration will strengthen Cisco’s ability to deliver DEM, especially when combined with the Real User Monitoring technology that Smartlook is bringing to the table, Pereira said.

Cisco’s partner ecosystem, said Pereira, is a big part of Cisco’s differentiation in the observability arena.

“Cisco has been for over 30-plus years selling indirect. Now, we’re coming with a [full-stack observability] platform that is manifesting an opportunity that is part of a business transition that is happening everywhere because everybody’s trying to find digital experiences for their customers,” he said.

The tech giant views the platform as extensible for partners, who can build on top of the offering, he said.

The Cisco Customer DEM offering, which provides insights into both the application and the network, is automatically available without further installations, Cisco said.