Tag: cisco

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.