Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability Vision For $34B Market Includes Partner Innovation

To go after the soon-to-be $34 billion observability market opportunity, Cisco has unveiled its observability ecosystem with seven new partner modules which lets developers create new modules on the Cisco Observability Platform.

Cisco’s full-stack observability (FSO) platform, which encompasses networking, infrastructure, and application observability, is getting a boost with seven new partner modules built on top of the platform for partners and developers.

The company said these new partner-powered modules, which are focused on business insights, SAP, networking, machine learning operations and sustainability, are bringing the vision of an FSO ecosystem to reality.

“FSO is a platform that partners can build on top of … it’s a business opportunity for [partners] because they have access to the massive Cisco application, computing, networking, telemetry and everything that goes into it. And it’s multi-vendor,” said Carlos Pereira, fellow and chief architect, strategy, incubation and applications for Cisco.

Liz Centoni, Cisco’s executive vice president and general manager of applications and chief strategy officer, called out observability as a $34 billion opportunity by 2025. It’s a space that the tech giant must tackle with partners, she said.

“We want to go out there and take more of our fair share of it,” she added.

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If Cisco’s planned $28 billion acquisition of Splunk is any indication, the networking giant is serious about its plan to serve up AI-enabled security and full-stack observability, said Lane Irvine, network business solutions director for Calgary, Alberta-based Long View Systems, a longtime Cisco Gold partner.

“This is a really big piece of where they’re going,” Irvine said. “I don’t think they found the magic bullet yet, but they’ve got the right idea and roadmap. They are really now saying: ‘If we bring this all together, all the visibility from all our products we’ve got into a single dashboard, this will bring big value to customers.”

At Cisco Live 2023 in June, the company unveiled the Cisco Observability platform, which pulls in data from multiple domains including applications, networking, infrastructure, security, cloud, sustainability, and other business sources. Now at Partner Summit 2023, there’s no better time to launch partner modules for the Cisco Observability platform, Pereira said.

Cisco on Tuesday launched seven new partner modules that have been built on top of the Cisco Observability platform that are generally available now:

* Evolutio, a module that simplifies the correlation and monitoring of orders, shipping, and payments to identify and resolve issues with applications and infrastructure with eCommerce Management module.

* DataRobot for Evolutio, which extends observability with monitoring and production diagnostics to track and improve performance of both predictive and generative AI models.

* Evolutio’s Insurance Claims Management module, which helps insurance carriers correlate and view the health of claims processes by product types, underwriters, regions, and business units.

* CloudFabrix SAP Landscape Visibility, a module that can ingest data from Cisco AppDynamics SAP Monitoring and correlate it to asset types to isolate root cause and determine the effect of impacted services on the business.

* CloudFabrix Campus Analytics, a module for aggregating Cisco DNA Controller analytics to serve up campus return-to-work insights.

* Nobl9 SLO Observability, which helps define and create Service Level Objectives (SLOs) around reliability and remaining error budget for given services and workload visualizations.

* Climatiq, a module for carbon emissions tracking to existing cloud metrics, with Public Cloud Sustainability, including analysis, comparison, and benchmarking for data.

The new modules join Cisco’s existing modules that the FSO platform launched with less than six months ago, including Cost Insights to help businesses understand the fiscal impact of their cloud applications, while also supporting sustainability efforts; Application Resource Optimizer which offers visibility into Kubernetes workload resource utilization, Security Insights to generate an application-based business risk score; and Cisco AIOps to help IT professionals visualize contextualized data relevant to infrastructure, network, incidents, and performance of a business applications in one dashboard.

Developers can also build their own observability solutions into the extensible platform, according to San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco.

More than 90 percent of Cisco’s FSO deals today involve partners, Centoni said.

Cisco AppDynamics and FSO is available now on the AWS Marketplace and will be available soon on the Microsoft Azure marketplace, she added.

Modules Coming Soon

Cisco at Partner Summit also shared three modules that are slated to go live in February on the observability platform. Those include Observability 360 SAP Business Flow by Accenture, which Cisco said brings unified SAP monitoring to the enterprise by correlating application observability and service management with business impact data. Next is MILOps Overview By Aporia, which provides a holistic view of ML model performance for faster issue resolution. Lastly is Sustainability Insights powered by Cisco CX. This module gives real-time interactive visualizations, measurement, estimation, and reporting of key infrastructure sustainability indicators, trended over time, according to the company.