Category: AppDynamics

One Platform. Full Stack. In Context

AppDynamics, Blog, Cisco, Monitor, News, ObservabilityKelly Cooke

JDS has a proud history of working with industry-leading tools and ensuring they provide value for your business. We are excited to share that one of our major partners, Cisco, has announced their much-anticipated Full-Stack Observability (FSO) Platform at CiscoLive Las Vegas this month. We have been looking forward to the launch of the FSO platform which will help us unlock much greater value in Observability data. This will benefit our clients by allowing them to bring in a wider variety of data across the app and infrastructure stack, enriched with business context and activity data so you can ensure your tech is optimised for maximum business performance.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en_ca/solutions/full-stack-observability.html?socialshare=lightbox-fso-video

Most of our clients are involved in some level of digital transformation – be it moving to cloud-native or SaaS stacks, simplifying customer experiences with digital apps, or streamlining business processes with smart tech. This has typically meant a lot more moving parts and every time something isn’t right, a new needle-in-the-haystack challenge is presented. Being able to observe a customer’s journey and experience, including all of the technical and business elements involved, pinpoint problems or identify high-value optimisations, is critical for operational success. 

Businesses need the ability to get fast answers to questions like “where is slowness occurring”, “how can we optimise resource usage” or “where can we improve conversion.” Cisco FSO Platform has a ubiquitous and context-rich data platform, with flexible query tools and packaged solutions, to ensure IT is working at its best.

An Overview of the Cisco FSO Platform

The Cisco FSO Platform was designed from the ground up to provide end-to-end visibility across complex, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It delivers an extensible, entity-based data model that provides the flexibility to ingest any observability data with business context. By leveraging OpenTelemetry and harnessing the power of Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces (MELT) to seamlessly collect and analyse data generated by any source, the FSO Platform is a versatile and comprehensive solution to capture observability data across an enterprise.

Right out of the gate there are features for application visibility, security insights, resource and cost optimisation, plus partner-led tools for financial visibility and capacity planning. 


Cloud Native Application Observability

One of the standout features of the Cisco FSO Platform is its Cloud Native Application Observability capability. This feature provides deep visibility into cloud-native environments, allowing organisations to monitor and troubleshoot their applications with ease. By providing insights into digital experiences, ensuring performance alignment with end-user expectations, prioritising actions, and reducing risks, businesses can gain valuable insights into the performance and behaviour of their applications. This allows customers the ability to identify and resolve issues before they impact users.

The Verdict

The Cisco FSO Platform is an innovative solution that offers an impressive suite of features that enable businesses to enhance digital experiences, mitigate risks, and drive operational efficiency.  

The Platform represents a significant milestone in Cisco’s FSO strategy, and shows their commitment to providing a comprehensive observability solution for clients. While other observability platforms can ingest data at scale, they face challenges in understanding and building a view of services.  Cisco’s approach was to build a solution that utilises an entity model at its core, which can be tailored to overcome these limitations. This is crucial with the complexity of modern applications spanning cloud, on-premise, microservices, SaaS, and serverless technologies, yet still needing to understand your customers’ digital journey and experience as they interact with your business. 

We will be keeping a keen eye on developments and look forward to sharing our experiences as we work with our customers to rationalise their observability strategies, harnessing the unique capabilities of the FSO Platform.

Four Exciting Takeaways from Cisco Live 2023

AppDynamics, Blog, NewsKelly Cooke

2023 is off to an exciting start for JDS, as Australia’s leading Cisco Full Stack Observability partner. There were a host of new product features and announcements which came out of Cisco Live in Amsterdam last month, all focused on fast and secure customer experiences with data-driven insights and action. 

Here are four exciting takeaways from the event that we’re particularly excited about: 

New release for On-premise Platform

AppDynamics have released v23.2 for the on-premise controller and platform components, bringing a raft of security and compatibility updates, and parity for APM & EUM agent functionality with the SaaS platform. Some of our clients have strict requirements around data protection, and AppDynamics On-Premise allows them to gain the same deep level of observability into their apps, while keeping data within their network.

Two-way integration between AppDynamics and ThousandEyes (TE) and TE Open Telemetry support

None of us want to have to scramble to multiple different tools when degradation occurs just to figure out where in the stack something is broken. It adds unnecessary time in determining the root cause and increases MTTR. 

Cisco has made significant improvements by adding support for OpenTelemetry into ThousandEyes, and an out-of-the-box integration to bring detailed network level metrics into AppDynamics dashboards. This allows ThousandEyes to be aware of the application context and show application health status from AppDynamics, alongside network tests. 

This advancement will help to understand much faster whether the network or internet is impacting your application health, and which parts of the application and business are affected when it does. 

Brand new Full Stack Observability data platform

Observing modern application stacks means taking and analysing A LOT of measurements, and it needs to be fast and flexible to allow insights to be gained without onerous number crunching or actions taken. A data platform that can ingest large volumes of ubiquitous data with fast analytics is critical to this, and Cisco’s new Full Stack Observability platform delivers on these requirements.

Highlights of the new platform, slated for release in April 2023, are: 

  • Much more than just a data lake. Correlate data with business and IT context to understand impact and importance.
  • Bring in any MELT data via Open Telemetry. If you can describe it with OTLP, it can be ingested. 
  • Make use of AppDynamics Cloud, built on the FSO platform, to visualise and analyse data, use third party UIs like Grafana, or build your own for your use cases.

Secure the stack with new integrations and intelligence in Cisco Secure App

Secure App leverages the AppDynamics agents to identify vulnerabilities, detect attacks and block them in real time – cutting off new threats immediately, and giving you valuable time to rectify your code. 

This capability has now been expanded with new integrations and intelligence within a range of Cisco Security tools. 

  • Kenna & Talos – leveraging a vast feed of threat and exploit data feeds and known vulnerabilities to assess your risk levels in the context of your app and business
  • Panoptica – providing assessment of 3rd party APIs to understand your exposure to your downstream dependencies such as SaaS services and partner apps. 
  • AppDynamics Business Transaction awareness – understand the business context of threats and which aspects of your applications are at risk.

JDS and the GO Foundation

AppDynamics, Atlassian, Big Picture, JDS People, JDSSecurity, New Relic, News, ServiceNow, SplunkKelly Cooke

The Go Foundation is an inspiring organisation empowering young Indigenous Australians by providing scholarships from primary school through to University.

Co-founded by Adam Goodes and Michael O’Loughlin in 2009, the foundation offers mentoring, leadership, networks and support to GO students on their journey to employment.

JDS is immensely proud to have committed to donating $30k to the GO Foundation over the next three years.

It is an organisation that really resonates, as we recognise the vital importance of ensuring that all Australians have equal opportunity to participate socially, culturally and economically.

Extensive research has revealed that the completion of further education by Indigenous Australians can lead to increased earning capacity, greater employment opportunities, improved health and wellbeing outcomes, and reduced interaction with the justice system. The benefits that can come from Indigenous Australians going further beyond high school with their education can stretch beyond improving and enriching the lives of Indigenous communities – they can benefit everyone.

Positive enabling factors that are likely to increase Indigenous participation in further education include enhancing the quality of school experience for Indigenous students to ensure that culture is recognised, and the aspirations of each student is developed. Additionally, providing access to career advice and guidance, and information on the various choices and pathways available for Indigenous students is linked to increasing the quality of the school experience for Indigenous Australians.

The GO Foundation’s scholarship program provides financial assistance, tools and resources for Indigenous students to ensure their journey through school is rich and rewarding, and a broad range of career options, work experience and paid internships ensures the assistance continues well after the scholarship has ended.    

We hope that by dedicating our long-term support, we are contributing to generational change and opportunities for many students for many years to come.

Cisco

AppDynamicsKelly Cooke

Full Stack Observability is in our DNA with 15+ years of experience, spanning several generations of solutions. JDS has the trusted skills and local capabilities to deploy, integrate and optimise your chosen Cisco FSO platforms, which include AppDynamics, ThousandEyes and Intersight Workload Optimizer (IWO), to actualise your observability strategy.

Implementations

Our Cisco team will guide you through strategy development and business value identification. Then deliver on that with a seamless implementation to expedite the adoption of the chosen solution. The JDS team of Cisco FSO experts are passionate about enhancing the digital experience and ensuring IT works for your organizational model.


Deeper Visibility

JDS connects full stack observability with real-time business metrics to give enterprises deeper and more contextual visibility into the performance of their applications.  We can help you be known for providing the best digital experience by identifying and prioritising the most critical issues before they affect your users.


Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)

Optimise your customer and employee experience by gaining unrivaled visibility and understanding of your complete digital supply chain, from synthetic transactions and service availability to network paths and internet routing feeds.  Entrust JDS to implement ThousandEyes DEM and observe the entire digital experience as a whole, allowing for more effective planning and enhancement of the operational journey.

Application Resource Management

JDS can help to simplify and automate application resource management at scale, reducing costs and increasing resource utilisation without overprovisioning.  Implementing Cisco Intersight Workload Optimization (IWO) will assist in efficiently scaling resources according to actual application requirements for optimal performance.


AppDynamics Cloud

AppDynamics Cloud is a purpose-built solution, providing cohesive observability across even the most complex cloud native technology landscapes.  JDS can assist current AppDynamics customers upgrade to AppDynamics Cloud to leverage their existing APM agents, or feed both solutions concurrently.


Centre of Excellence

Drive adoption through support, knowledge transfer and communication.  JDS offers a range of services to help you keep your Cisco environment current and in safe hands. We have remarkably experienced technical resources to provide you with the knowledge and guidance required to realise the value from your investment.

Success Stories

A successful Cisco FSO outcome for a prominent Australian retailer >>

AppDynamics BizIQ transforms an online retail experience >>

Related Stories

One Platform. Full Stack. In Context

One Platform. Full Stack. In Context

Jun 28, 2023
Four Exciting Takeaways from Cisco Live 2023

Four Exciting Takeaways from Cisco Live 2023

Mar 20, 2023
JDS and the GO Foundation

JDS and the GO Foundation

Apr 13, 2022

Understanding your Customer Journeys in Salesforce with AppDynamics

AppDynamics, Blog, Tech TipsJDS

The Problem

JDS Australia works with numerous customers who utilise the force.com platform as the primary interface for their end users (internal and external) to execute business critical services. The flexibility and extensibility of the component based Lightning framework has allowed businesses to customise the platform to meet their specific requirements.

However, many of these companies struggle to monitor, quantify or pinpoint the impact of performance in the Salesforce platform to their end users and ultimately their business. Furthermore, there is limited capability to provide detailed Salesforce information for root cause analysis (e.g. is the problem with a particular lightning component(s) vs core Salesforce platform vs multiple pages?).

The Solution

Using AppDynamics Real User Browser Monitoring (RUM) coupled with advanced JavaScript configuration, we have created a solution.

Unlike traditional methods involving logfile or API based monitoring; real user monitoring collects rich metrics from the end users’ perspective. JDS has also further integrated  additional custom code to identify AJAX requests and inject page names into the stream and provide business context and make sense of the data.

Dashboards provide Salesforce Performance at a glance

Additionally, AppDynamics RUM is able to identify and dynamically visualise each step of Customer Journeys as they traverse Salesforce, in near real time. 

Using the collated metrics these businesses have been able to proactively alert support teams of issues, and also utilise the historic data to analyse customer behaviour to understand how customers are using the platform. For example, expected user journeys vs actual user journeys.

AppDynamics RUM captures detailed diagnostic information to help triage issues, including:

  • Single Page Application performance
  • Page Component load details, 
  • AJAX requests, 
  • Detailed Error Snapshots
  • Dynamic Business Transaction Baselining (Normal vs Slow Performance)
  • User browser version and device type,
  • Geographic location of users,
  • Connection method (e.g. browser vs mobile), and device type. 

AppDynamics RUM can also provide direct correlation to AppDynamics APM agents to combine the ‘front-end’ and ‘back-end’ of these user sessions where Salesforce may traverse additional down-stream applications and infrastructure.

Why JDS?

As experts in Application Performance Management (APM) and Observability, JDS have extensive experience in helping our customers determine the root cause of performance issues.

Contact us at [email protected] to discuss how monitoring Salesforce can be used to understand your end users and make informed decisions with quantifiable metrics. 

What if your application was one second faster?

AppDynamics, Micro Focus, ServiceNow, Services, SplunkJDS

Why one second faster?

Improving your website performance will increase your business. But don’t take our word for it—there is plenty of evidence.

According to Kissmetrics:

  • 25% of consumers will abandon a website that takes more than four seconds to load
  • 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less
  • 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy from the same site again
  • A one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions
  • A one-second delay (or three seconds of waiting) decreases customer satisfaction by about 16%

So, what would performing one second faster mean for your web application or website? JDS is now offering a limited time promotion that will allow you to realise the maximum performance of your website or application. Over the course of five days, our experts will work with your team to analyse your web application and accelerate its performance for your customers.

 

What’s included?

  • Your own dedicated performance expert for five days (either on-site or off-site)
  • A technical deep dive of your web application, turning over every rock to understand how it can work faster and harder for your business
  • Best practice tips and techniques straight from the guys in the know
  • Experts fluent in everything from Java and .NET through to SAP and Oracle
  • A presentation and roadmap of the findings and recommendations found

Why JDS?

We are Australia’s leading performance test consultancy with 15 years of experience partnering with organisations of every size, from startups to large enterprises and governments. We have a reputation for being a key player in making Australian web applications exceptional. Want to get started? Reach out to a JDS team member, send an email to [email protected], or call 1300 780 432 to confidentially discuss your web application and how we can help.

We partner with leading technologies

Monitoring Atlassian Suite with AppDynamics

AppDynamics, Tech TipsJDS

Millions of IT professionals use JIRA, Confluence, and Bitbucket daily as the backbone of their software lifecycle. These tools are critical to getting anything done in thousands of organisations. If you’re reading this, it’s safe to guess that’s the case for your organisation too!

Application monitoring is crucial when your business relies on good application performance. Just knowing that your application is running isn’t enough; you need assurance that it’s performing optimally. This is what a JDS client that runs in-house instances of JIRA, Confluence, and Bitbucket, recently found out.

This client, a major Australian bank, started to notice slowness with JIRA, but the standard infrastructure monitoring they were using was not providing enough insight to allow them to determine the root cause.

JDS was able to instrument their Atlassian products with AppDynamics APM agents to gain insights into the performance of the applications. After deployment of the Java Agents to the applications, AppDynamics automatically populated the topology map below, known as a Flow Map. This Flow Map shows the interactions for each application, accompanied by overall application and Business Transaction health, and metrics like load, response time, and errors.

After some investigation, we found the root cause of the JIRA slowness was some Memcached backends. Once we determined the root cause and resolved the issue, operational dashboards were created to help the Operations team monitor the Atlassian application suite. Below is a screenshot of a subsection of the dashboard showing Database Response Times, Cache Response Times, and Garbage Collection information.

An overview dashboard was also created to assist with monitoring across the suite. The Dashboard has been split out to show Slow, Very Slow, and Error percentages along with Average Response Times and Call Volumes for each application. Drilldowns were also added to take the user directly to the respective application Flow Map. Using these dashboards, they can, at a glance, check the overall application health for the Atlassian products. This has helped them improve the quality of service and user experience.

The bank’s JIRA users now suffer from far fewer slowdowns, particularly during morning peaks when many hurried story updates are taking place in time for stand-ups! The DevOps team is also able to get a heads-up from AppDynamics when slowness starts to occur, rather than when performance has fallen off a cliff.

So if you’re looking for more effective ways to monitor your Atlassian products, give our AppDynamics team a call. We can develop and implement a customised solution for your business to help ensure your applications run smoothly and at peak performance.

Our team on the case

Our AppDynamics stories

JDS wins AppDynamics Partner Award

AppDynamics, NewsJDS

JDS Win AppDynamics 2016 Emerging Markets Partner of the Year Award

We are delighted to announce JDS have received the AppDynamics 2016 Emerging Markets Partner of the Year Award at AppSphere 2016 in Las Vegas on the 15th Of November. As a team, we are very proud of this award as it is the result of a lot of hard work from a lot of talented people at JDS.

John Bearsley, Managing Director of JDS said, “AppDynamics has stormed the market in the past few years as one of the leading next generation Application Performance Management Tools. We have seen first hand how it can transform the monitoring landscape for our customers providing them great visibility into the end user experience and the performance and availability of their business critical applications. AppDynamics is a vendor we are proud to support and we look forward to helping many more customers derive its significant benefits in the years to come”.
appd-awardv2

To see how JDS can help ensure it works with AppDynamics check out our AppDynamics Page.

 

Completing the APM picture with AppDynamics EUM

AppDynamics, NewsJDS

How are your customers really experiencing your apps right now? How is your business reputation, loyalty and revenue being affected by the world between your application servers and your customer? AppDynamics End User Monitoring (EUM) completes the APM picture by letting you See, Act on, and Know about your customers' real experiences in real time.

With EUM, AppDynamics extends the valuable insights it provides by tracing all the way out to the browser or mobile app giving complete end-to-end visibility for every customer experience.

Watch this session to learn:

  • Why you need to understand the full customer experience on top of what is happening in your data centre.
  • The customer experience metrics that matter most.
  • How AppDynamics EUM gives visibility of the complete picture from your customer's devices to and through your backend APIs and applications.
  • How EUM Synthetics further helps you to Know at all times that your apps are working at their best.

Discover exactly how your end users experience and engage with your applications.