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.