The IT Nerd

Cisco today announced new business metrics in Cisco Cloud Observability. Powered by the Cisco Observability Platform to enhance business context for modern applications running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This latest release also supports integration with AWS services and application performance monitoring (APM) correlation and provides end-to-end visibility into the performance of cloud native applications.   

Traditional application monitoring tools only provide visibility of application and infrastructure performance metrics. This leaves teams— including ITOps, DevOps and SREs— managing modern applications without clear sight into the relationship between application performance and critical business KPIs such as customer conversion rates and real-time impact on business revenue.  

As a result, these teams are unable to make prioritizations based on business impact.  

Cisco’s latest innovations in full-stack observability deliver teams with the enhanced business context they need to manage modern applications and protect revenue, customer experiences and brand reputation, bridging the gap between business goals and IT. 

This new capability empowers users with:  

• Support for multiple business metrics within a business transaction.   
• Easy identification of business transactions configured with business metrics for troubleshooting.  
• User-friendly configuration interface that enables users to preview business transaction attributes for accuracy and set up mission-critical metric alerts.   
• Advanced KPI visualization including baseline performance and a historical analysis trend line, to easily identify when business performance is abnormal.    
• Data segmentation by selected attribute values for quick visibility of customer segments being affected most. 

Supporting integration with more AWS services, DevOps teams can also now observe AWS Lambda functions as an entity within Cisco Cloud Observability APM pages, helping them to understand the functions’ contribution to an application, correlate their performance to overall user experience and quickly troubleshoot unexpected behaviour.   

Cisco also announced support for 10 additional AWS services that are now pre-integrated with Cisco Cloud Observability. By tying together applications, business transactions, business metrics and expanded support for AWS infrastructure services, application owners can gain deep cross-domain visibility across the full stack. 

Business metrics for Cisco Cloud Observability is now available. For more information, register for their upcoming webinar here. 

A new report from Cisco AppDynamics shows that, while the use of digital services and applications reached new heights during the pandemic, today, consumer demand for applications continues to increase. However, there has been a shift in consumer expectations, with users looking for ever more intuitive and personalized digital experiences. 

• New Expectations: 59 per cent of Canadians claim their expectations for digital experiences are far higher now than they were two years ago – citing slow screen loading, applications crashing and poor connectivity among the most frustrating problems. 
• Application Clutter: 70 per cent of users are keen to get rid of applications they don’t use enough or value anymore. 
• No Second Chances: 54 per cent of consumers feel disrespected by brands whose applications don’t meet their expectations and 63 per cent say to be less forgiving of brands when problems occur.  
• Digital Disruption (literally): An alarming 83 per cent report they have experienced performance issues when using applications over the past 12 months.   

The report also unveiled a new cohort of application user – “The Application Generation.” This group, aged 18-34, use 41 different applications and digital services each month (compared to 30 for those aged 35 and above) and are far more discerning about the quality of applications – 70 per cent claim to be more mindful about the applications they install on their devices. 

You can read the full report here.

Innovative new partner modules built on the Cisco Observability Platform across five critical themes: Business Insights, SAP Visibility, Networking, MLOps & SLO, and Sustainability

We are pleased to announce seven new partner modules have been built on the Cisco Observability Platform, further bringing the vision of a Cisco Full-Stack Observability ecosystem to life. These new modules are focused on five critical areas — Business Insights, SAP Visibility, Networking, Machine learning operations (MLOps) & Service Level Objectives (SLO) and Sustainability — and are designed to help organizations get value from observable telemetry data.

These five areas are important to our customers as they look to correlate business metrics with infrastructure and application performance, gain more visibility into the performance of mission-critical applications, and understand the relationship between network performance and applications. The new partner modules will also help customers surface insights in areas of competitive differentiation, including generative AI in modern applications and sustainability.

It’s exciting to see our strong partner community bring their expertise in these areas to the Cisco Observability Platform. They are rallying around and extending the Cisco Full-Stack Observability ecosystem with new and custom use cases, delivering added value for our customers.

Building a Full-Stack Observability ecosystem

Today, virtually all businesses are digitally led: they deliver experiences with applications and through applications. However, the environments in which these applications are built are increasingly complex. IT and security teams as well as business leaders must be able to observe all aspects of performance and to tie that performance to clear business outcomes.

There are numerous barriers to observability. For example, a recent IDC report indicates that 60% of IT professionals are concerned that most observability tools are too narrowly focused and fail to give them a complete view into current and trending operating conditions. Additionally, 65% say they want a programmable and extensible observability solution that can be leveraged for use cases specific to their environment.

This calls for a platform that scales as businesses scale and easily extends across the infrastructure and lifecycle of their applications. Leaders need complete visibility, context, and control so they can ensure their employees, business partners, and customers are empowered with the best digital experiences possible.

Cisco Observability Platform is the only vendor-agnostic, entity-based observability platform in the market. It has been built from day-one to leverage open standards, anchored on telemetry coming from any endpoint across any domain.

The open, extensible, API-driven architecture of Cisco Observability Platform enables the creation of an observability ecosystem. It also allows development partners to build novel observability solutions and realize new revenue streams from those solutions.

New partner modules now available

The modules — plugin-like extensions — our development partners create on the Cisco Observability Platform enable additional capabilities within Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions. Today’s newly released modules, which are available now on the Cisco Observability Platform exchange, showcase how we’re empowering a community that creates more insightful, useful observability applications.

• Evolutio has made it easier to correlate and monitor orders, shipping, and payments to identify and resolve issues with applications and infrastructure with eCommerce module.
• DataRobot and Evolutio extends observability with monitoring and production diagnostics to track and improve performance of both predictive and generative AI models.
• Evolutio’s Claims module helps insurance carriers correlate and view the health of claims processes by product types, underwriters, regions, and business units.
• CloudFabrix SAP Observability module can ingest data from Cisco AppDynamics SAP Monitoring, correlating it to asset types to isolate root cause and determine the effect of impacted services on the business.
• CloudFabrix Campus Analytics module makes it possible to aggregate Cisco DNA Controller analytics to deliver campus return-to-work insights.
• Nobl9 SLO module helps define and create Service Level Objectives (SLOs) around reliability and remaining error budget for given services and workload visualizations.
• Climatiq has introduced carbon emissions tracking to existing cloud metrics, with Cloud Carbon Insights, including analysis, comparison, and benchmarking for data.

In addition, we’re announcing two more modules that will be available soon:

• Aporia MLOps module offers a holistic view of ML model performance and empowers teams to swiftly identify, dive deeper into, and resolve issues faster.
• Cisco CX’s Sustainability Insights provides real-time interactive visualizations, measurement, estimation, and reporting of key infrastructure sustainability indicators, trended over time.

Cisco announced seven new modules on the Cisco Observability Platform, built by development partners and created to expand its full-stack observability ecosystem. This growing ecosystem helps customers fulfill their specific observability needs and utilize additional value from observable telemetry.  

The new modules are focused on five critical areas: Business Insights, SAP Visibility, Networking, MLOps & SLO, and Sustainability.   

Today’s modern businesses are digitally led, with customer and user experiences achieved with and through applications. The speed and complexity of how these applications are built demands that IT teams, security teams and business leaders observe all aspects of application performance and experience in real-time.  

However, according to a recent IDC report, 60 per cent of IT professionals are worried that most observability tools serve narrow requirements, failing to give IT teams a complete view into current and trending operating conditions¹. Further, 65 per cent stated the need for a programmable and extensible observability solution that could be used for use cases specific to their own business. 

Today’s announcement sees Cisco empower a diverse ecosystem of developers to create and extend solutions that rapidly create customer value from observable telemetry. Beyond just interpreting telemetry, the Cisco Observability Platform provides capabilities to surround that data with context, so organizations get both insight and the ability to take specific action(s). New partner modules are focused around five critical themes:  

• Business Insights: Correlate telemetry data with business performance across multiple domains, providing customers with full visibility and insights on how business interacts with IT. 
• SAP Visibility: Help customers achieve holistic observability across often changeable, expanding and complex SAP landscapes and ecosystems. 
• Networking: Leverage Cisco’s networking expertise to correlate key network telemetry with business metrics and application stack. 
• MLOps and SLO: With the growing use of generative AI and the mainstream of modern applications, the Cisco Observability Platform helps customers to monitor these applications, their SLO and bring the monitoring of large language models (LLMs), and MLOps models together with application observability. 
• Sustainability: Help customers achieve their sustainability goals by providing data around the carbon footprint across multiple IT domains and help optimize around energy consumption. 

Partners are already seeing value in the Cisco Observability Platform and developing modules to help customers derive value from their observable telemetry. By building and offering solution sets on the Platform, partners can assist in providing the observability needs of Cisco’s customer base. 

The following modules are available on the Cisco Observability Platform exchange at Partner Summit:  

• CloudFabrix – SAP Observability: Enables customers to ingest data from Cisco AppDynamics agents for SAP Monitoring. It correlates telemetry data and asset types together to isolate the root cause of issues in the SAP landscape and determine the effect of impacted services on the business. 
• CloudFabrix – Campus Analytics: Provides network analytics for campus environments as employees return to offices. This module aggregates multiple Cisco DNA Controller analytics to provide near real-time network topology information, bandwidth consumption and hotspot visibility.  
• Evolutio – Claims: Insurance institutions are looking to gather multiple claims processes in a single pane of glass to best understand process health and user-experience. The module helps to correlate and view the health of different claims processes in real-time as it relates to product types, underwriters, regions, and business units. 
• Evolutio – eCommerce: With the growth of ecommerce and the technology that powers it, organizations need a solution to track every part of the shopping experience. This module allows the correlation by product category or region, by monitoring of orders, shipping, inventory, and payments to quickly identify issues against the supporting infrastructure and applications. 
• DataRobot – MLOps by Evolutio: Extends observability for both predictive AI and generative AI, with always-on monitoring and production diagnostics to track and improve performance of your models. Stay informed of key metrics like service health, accuracy and data drift. 
• Nobl9 – Service Level Objectives (SLO): Provides a platform for defining and creating SLO for understanding reliability across organizations and share remaining error budget for given services as well as SLO-related visualizations for workloads.  
• Climatiq – Cloud Carbon Insights: Adds carbon emission tracking to existing cloud metrics and enables analyzing, comparing, and benchmarking emissions data. These actionable insights accelerate journeys to net zero and make more environmentally conscious decisions.  

In addition, the following modules will be available soon:  

• Cisco CX – Sustainability Insights: Provides a sustainability portal that acts as a single pane of glass for near real-time interactive visualizations, measurement, estimation and reporting of key infrastructure sustainability indicators, trended over time, aiming for workload and datacenter energy optimization. 
• Aporia – MLOps: A significant number of challenges faced by ML models in production arise from a combination of data inconsistencies and the software infrastructure they operate on. The module will not only offer a holistic view of the model’s performance but also empowers teams to swiftly identify, dive deeper into, and resolve issues faster. 

About Cisco Observability Platform  

Cisco Observability Platform—a vendor-agnostic solution that harnesses the power of the company’s full portfolio – was launched at Cisco Live US in June 2023. The Platform delivers contextual, correlated, and predictive insights that allow customers to resolve performance issues more quickly and optimize digital experiences, while minimizing business risk. This industry-leading extensible platform offering delivers customers a new observability ecosystem that brings data together from multiple domains including applications, networking, multi-cloud infrastructure, cloud services, security, endpoints, sustainability, and business sources. 

By Joe Byrne, Executive CTO, Cisco AppDynamics

Across all industries, technologists are facing escalating levels of complexity as organizations rapidly ramp up their adoption of cloud native technologies, while also maintaining existing on-premises applications and infrastructure. 

This shift to hybrid environments means that IT teams are having to manage an increasingly extensive and fragmented IT landscape, with application components running across both cloud native and on-premises technologies. This poses significant challenges, including increased attack surfaces, limited visibility concerning application availability and performance, an inability to link innovation costs with business outcomes. 

One of the biggest problems that IT teams are facing as they move to a hybrid environment is how to manage the increased volumes of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) data which are spawned by cloud native technologies such as microservices and containers. Most technologists don’t have the right tools to sift through this overwhelming data noise to efficiently detect and identify the root causes of application performance issues. 

In research from Cisco AppDynamics, The Age of Application Observability, 78 per cent of technologists state that the increased volume of data from multi-cloud and hybrid environments is making manual monitoring impossible. They recognize that traditional application monitoring approaches are simply not fit for purpose in highly volatile and dynamic hybrid environments. They’re concerned about the potential consequences of this for their organizations – including application disruption and downtime, security breaches and sub-optimaldigital experiences for customers and employees. 

In response to this challenge, technologists are looking to implement new approaches and solutions to manage application availability, performance, and security. They point to application observability as a way for IT teams to cut through complexity within hybrid environments and deliver seamless digital experiences. 

The Limitations of Traditional Application Monitoring Methods 

Most IT departments are still relying on separate tools to monitor on-premises and cloud applications, and they lack visibility of the entire application path where components are running across hybrid environments. This is making effective troubleshooting within hybrid environments nearly impossible and, inevitably, key metrics such as Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) are going in the wrong direction. 

Less than half of technologists are confident their organization has the right skills and processes in place to manage application availability, performance and security in a sustainable way. Most IT departments aren’t set up to operate effectively within a hybrid environment, where collaboration between teams is essential to optimize applications. These departments are still often characterized by siloed people, processes, and data. 

The Crucial Role of Application Observability in Ensuring Seamless Performance 

97 per cent of technologists state their organization needs to move from a monitoring approach to an observability solution to effectively manage multi-cloud and hybrid environments. 

Application observability provides unified visibility across both cloud native and on-premises environments, ingesting and combining vast volumes of telemetry data from cloud native environments and data from agent-based entities within on-premises applications. It allows IT teams to access real-time insights into application availability and performance across their hybrid environments. 

Crucially, application observability enables technologists to correlate application performance data with real-time business metrics so they can quickly pinpoint and prioritize issues with the potential to do serious damage to end user experience. This allows technologists to cut through complexity and data noise to focus their time and investments on the things that will have the greatest impact on customers and the business. 

An application observability approach is essential to break down silos in the IT department, bringing teams together around a single source of trusted data to achieve shared objectives. Ultimately, application observability leads to improved collaboration, efficiency, and productivity in the IT department, freeing up technologists from reactive firefighting to take a more proactive approach to innovation. Businesses can’t delay any longer – they must move beyond traditional application monitoring approaches to compete and thrive. 

Cisco has patched two zero-day vulnerabilities that exposed Cisco IOS XE system software hosts to attackers. More details on that here and here. These vulnerabilities affected devices running the Cisco IOS XE software, such as routers and switches.

You can get the patches via Cisco’s software download portal. Customers who do not have a Cisco service contract or cannot obtain fixed software through their third-party vendors can contact Cisco support. These fixes started to roll out on October 22. And the Cisco Talos Intelligence Group wrote in a threat advisory updated on October 23.

Thus it’s time to patch all of your gear ASAP as these zero days are being actively exploited.

Cisco has announced the availability of Cisco Secure Application (previously Security Insights for Cloud Native Application Observability) on the Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform, enabling organizations to bring together application and security teams to securely develop and deploy modern applications. The latest release of Cisco Secure Application helps customers to securely manage cloud native applications in addition to hybrid applications.

In the race to deliver seamless digital experiences, IT teams have experienced an increase in the need to shift to modern, distributed applications, but according to a recent Cisco study, 92 per cent of global technologists admit that the rush to rapidly innovate and respond to the changing needs of customers has come at the expense of robust application security during software development1.

This has left companies exposed to security vulnerabilities and threats, with larger attack surfaces and gaps in their application security layer caused by siloed teams both struggling to gain visibility and the right business context to prioritize vulnerabilities. As a result, organizations are reporting an explosion of security incidents in the modern environment, putting customer data and the reputation of their business at risk.

To help organizations secure cloud native applications, the new Cisco Secure Application offering – now available on Cisco’s recently launched Full-Stack Observability Platform – arms customers with expanded visibility and intelligent business risk insights across cloud environments, empowering businesses to better prioritize and respond in real-time to revenue and reputation-impacting security risks and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.

Cisco Secure Application integrates with Cisco’s industry leading security products and enables customers to:

• Locate and highlight security issues across application entities, including services, workloads, pods, containers and business transactions, and isolate them at speed.
• Prioritize issues with a business risk score that combines application performance data and business impact context from Cisco’s own Cloud Native Application Observability, with real-time vulnerability detection and security intelligence from Cisco’s security products, to identify which business transactions present the greatest risk.
• Accelerate response time to security incidents with real-time remediation guidance, complete with prescriptive actions to prioritize and address the most impactful security vulnerabilities.

About Cisco AppDynamics Full-Stack Observability Platform

Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform—a vendor-agnostic solution that harnesses the power of the company’s full portfolio – was launched at Cisco Live US in June 2023. The Platform delivers contextual, correlated, and predictive insights that allow customers to resolve performance issues more quickly and optimize digital experiences, while minimizing business risk. This industry-leading extensible platform offering delivers customers a new observability ecosystem that brings data together from multiple domains including applications, networking, multi-cloud infrastructure, cloud services, security, endpoints, sustainability, and business sources.

Cisco Secure Application is available today. Customers can visit our Cisco Secure Application webpage for more information.

By: Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco AppDynamics

Application observability has become a strategic focus for organizations across all industries. As IT teams face rising levels of complexity, they are actively seeking new tools, structures, and ways of working to effectively deal with these challenges. Technologists recognize that they need to move beyond traditional application monitoring approaches to manage and optimize increasingly fragmented and volatile hybrid environments. 

According to the latest research from Cisco AppDynamics, The Age of Application Observability, 53 per cent of organizations are already evaluating application observability solutions, and 44 per cent are likely to do so in the next 12 months.   

But with the pressure mounting on technologists to accelerate innovation and deliver seamless digital experiences, it’s essential that IT teams are able to identify the right application observability solution. More specifically, they need to ensure that they have unified visibility across their hybrid IT estate. 

A notable 89 per cent of technologists report that their organization’s expectations around application observability solutions are increasing. Businesses are looking at application observability to address some of their biggest strategic challenges, from embedding innovation into their everyday operations through to breaking down the organizational silos that exist between people, processes, and data.  

Here are five essential attributes to consider when evaluating application observability solutions:

 1. Integration of application availability and performance data with security

The most significant challenge technologists encounter while managing hybrid environments is the expansion of attack surfaces. With application components running across a mix of cloud native platforms and on-premises databases, visibility gaps are being exposed, leading to an increased risk of security events.   

Therefore, application observability solutions must combine performance and security monitoring. This allows IT teams to grasp the potential impact of vulnerabilities and incidents on end users and the business. By utilizing business transactions insights and severity scoring, IT teams can prioritize threats based on their contextual relevance, particularly those that may affect critical areas of the environment or application. Technologists can cut through the data noise caused by high volumes of security alerts and focus on the things that really matter.  

Technologists want an application observability solution that leverages automation and AI to automatically detect and resolve issues across the application landscape. AI should be deployed for continuous detection and prioritization, so that security exploits are identified and blocked automatically, without human intervention, maximizing speed and uptime while minimizing risk.    

2. Ability to validate investments in cloud native technologies   

Among the ongoing economic slowdown, digital transformation budgets are facing scrutiny, and IT leaders are under mounting pressure to justify their cloud investments. Despite this, a staggering 84 per cent of technologists admit that they struggle to align cloud costs with business performance.   

This is why technologists want an application observability solution which correlates IT data with business metrics. This enables IT leaders to generate business transaction insights in real-time, and then to view them in business-level dashboards. They can measure and demonstrate the value that their innovation programs are generating.  

Application observability should allow IT teams to make insight-driven decisions around investment. Indeed, 88 per cent of technologists claim that application observability with business context will enable them to be more strategic and spend more time on innovation. 

3. Simplifies rather than adds to complexity   

83 per cent of technologists state that levels of complexity within their IT department are rising because of increased deployment of cloud native technologies. IT teams are being bombarded with overwhelming volumes of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) data from microservices and containers.  

It’s essential that application observability solutions are able to simplify complexity, separating signal from noise to provide IT teams with key insights on application availability, performance and security. Technologists need a solution which offers complete visibility across the application landscape to easily understand how applications and digital services are performing in real time.

4. Provides a single version of truth for all availability, performance and security data   

With most IT departments still deploying separate tools to monitor cloud native and on-premises technologies, IT teams don’t have complete visibility up and down the application path where components are running across a hybrid environment. This approach reinforces siloed working practices and cultures, as teams are confined to their own datasets.  

Technologists are looking for an application observability solution which provides a single source of truth for all availability, performance, and security data. Application observability should provide a platform for much closer collaboration between developers, operations, and security teams, paving the way for a DevSecOps approach in the IT department. Technologists want application observability to unite IT teams around a common purpose and shared vision. 

5. Utilizes OpenTelemetry

As organizations transition to modern application stacks, OpenTelemetry becomes essential for IT teams seeking to effectively manage and optimize availability and performance within dynamic cloud native environments.   

This is why technologists point to the need for an application observability solution which can ingest the massive volumes of data they get from OpenTelemetry. Moreover, it should seamlessly integrate this data with information gathered from other sources through agents and public cloud environments like Kubernetes. 

Technologists want a unified application observability solution which can extract business transactions from OpenTelemetry data. This allows IT teams to generate business context throughout the overarching application flow to always drive seamless digital experiences.  

With application observability now a priority for 85 per cent of organizations, IT leaders will be looking to develop a holistic and future-proof strategy for their organization. This means finding a solution which provides flexibility to span across both cloud native and on-premises technologies, to provide IT teams with the real-time insights they need to manage and optimize application performance across hybrid environments.  

Ultimately, organizations need an application observability solution which meets the current and future needs of all technologists, enabling them to accelerate innovation and maximize their impact on customers and the business.  

    

By Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco AppDynamics 

The shape and make-up of IT departments has changed dramatically over recent years. Rapid adoption of cloud native technologies within many organizations has led to the emergence of new teams such as site reliability engineers (SREs), DevOps and CloudOps, each with very different approaches and ways of working. 

At the same time, organizations continue to deploy teams to manage existing on-premises applications and infrastructure. Most businesses are switching to a hybrid environment, leveraging the capabilities of modern application stacks to accelerate innovation and embed agility into their operations, while also maintaining on-premises technologies which can provide IT leaders with greater control, particularly when it comes to regulatory compliance and managing high value intellectual property (IP). 

Within such a hybrid environment, where application components increasingly run across cloud native technologies and on-premises technologies, it’s vital that teams work closely with one another in an open and collaborative way. 

However, in the latest research from Cisco AppDynamics, The Age of Application Observability, 80 per cent of global technologists say that there has been an increase in silos between IT teams because of managing multi-cloud and hybrid environments. For example, only a third (31 per cent) report there is ongoing collaboration between IT operations and security teams. 

This lack of collaboration has profound implications for organizations and technologists themselves. First, it reduces the ability of technologists to do their jobs properly and increases the likelihood of poor application performance and security breaches. This in turn leads to customer frustration, reputational risk and loss of revenue. 

Siloed ways of working are also putting technologists themselves under ever more intense pressure, with tensions growing in many IT departments. The research finds that growing numbers are leaving their jobs as a result of this and many more will do so unless IT leaders take steps to enable greater collaboration and more effective ways of working. 

Tools, structure, data and vision – The barriers to greater collaboration in the IT department

Currently, there are a whole range of reasons why technologists and teams can’t effectively work together to manage and optimize their hybrid environments. Most of all, technologists point to the fact that the tools and technologies they are using to manage application availability and performance only serve to reinforce silos. 

Most organizations are still deploying separate traditional monitoring tools for cloud native and on-premises technologies, and this means that IT teams are working with their own siloed data. Technologists are also unable to get a clear line of sight up and down the application path where components are running across hybrid environments. Teams are sticking to what they know and making decisions based on their own immediate interests, rather than being able to take a step back and consider the whole picture. 

But as well as technology and data, there are also cultural reasons why collaboration is currently lacking in so many IT departments. Many technologists state that current management and reporting structures prevent teams from working more closely together, while others rightly point out that it’s hard to adopt a collaborative approach when teams are still measured around very specific and siloed KPIs. Without a shared vision and shared objectives, there is little incentive for technologists to think beyond their own immediate team priorities. 

Silos within the IT department present a huge problem in terms of talent retention. In the research, more than a third of global technologists report that silos and ineffective collaboration are already leading to IT talent leaving their organization, and 46 per cent claim that churn within their IT department will increase if silos persist.   

Interestingly, 88 per cent of technologists believe that application observability with business context will enable them to operate more strategically and devote more time to innovation. 

Application observability can provide a platform for collaboration

Most technologists are very keen to work in a more collaborative way with other teams and to work towards shared KPIs across the whole IT department. They are eager to do this, not only to deliver seamless digital experiences to customers and accelerate innovation, but to progress their own careers, developing new skills and exposing themselves to new technologies and ways of working. 

Technologists in all industries recognize an urgent need to move away from traditional, siloed monitoring processes and tools, and to embrace application observability as a new approach which can unify all teams within the IT department around shared data, vision, and objectives. Indeed, 85 per cent claim that application observability is now a strategic priority for their organization. 

Application observability provides all IT teams with a single source of truth for all availability, performance, and security data, with unified visibility across both cloud native and on-premises technologies. Every technologist can get visibility across the application level, into the supporting digital services (such as microservices or Kubernetes) and into the underlying infrastructure-as-code (IaC) services (such as compute, server, database and network) they leverage from their cloud providers. 

With application observability, IT performance data can be correlated with real-time business metrics, enabling technologists to constantly track and optimize impact. This means that IT leaders can create a shared vision for the entire department and incentivize teams to come together to achieve shared KPIs. 

Interestingly, 88 per cent of technologists believe that application observability with business context will enable them to operate more strategically and devote more time to innovation. They believe application observability will allow them to escape the firefighting, tension and silos that are currently such a drain on their productivity and morale, and to spend more time on interesting projects which make a real difference to customers and the business. This is one of many reasons why the move to application observability is now essential for every IT leader. 

Following Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability momentum at Cisco Live US, Cisco AppDynamics today revealed new research on the challenges IT teams face in managing application availability and performance within hybrid IT environments. The report, titled, “The Age of Application Observability,” found an overwhelming majority of technologists (96%) point to a critical need to move from a monitoring approach to observability solutions for managing multi-cloud and hybrid environments, and 77% believe increased volume of data is making manual monitoring impossible. 

Because of the complexity driven by increased adoption of cloud native technologies, economic challenges slowing down cloud migration efforts, and continued proliferation of both hybrid and on-premises environments, more technologists are considering application observability as a path forward for monitoring and optimizing application performance.   

According to the research, 40% of organizations are already exploring solutions, and 85% state observability is now a strategic priority for their organization. The combination of cloud native adoption alongside on-premises technology means there’s a greater need for flexibility than ever before.  

The research includes findings from 1,140 IT professionals interviewed across 13 global markets, including Canada.

Some key report takeaways from Canada include:

• 87% of technologists claim that observability with business context will enable them to be more strategic and spend more time on innovation. 
• 83% of technologists state that adoption of cloud native technologies is leading to increased complexity within their IT department, with microservices and containers spawning a massive volume of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) data. 
• 71% report that leaders within their organization do not fully understand that modern applications need modern approaches and tools to manage availability, performance and security. 
• On average, technologists report that 49% of their new innovation initiatives are being delivered with cloud native technologies, and they expect this figure to climb to 61% over the next five years. That means that the majority of new digital transformation programs will be built on cloud native technologies by 2028.  

You can read the full findings here.