Did we mention that we’re on an observability trip here at Inside Analysis?
It’s a key trends that we need to follow, but why?
Well, it’s because a) cloud is inherently virtualized, so the need to ‘look inside’ and observe manifests itself as an imperative from day zero b) we are making use of increasingly abstracted tools (application services, functions, dashboards and so on) that pull us (human, but also machine) users further away from the internal workings of cloud workflows, so again, we need to look inside and c) observability just makes all-round blunt common sense, we need to know how our IT stack is faring on any given day.
Cisco AppDynamics
Obviously keen not to be left out of the observability conversation is Cisco with Cisco AppDynamics .
Towards the latter part of last year, we saw the firm announce major updates to its its cloud-native observability solution, known quite simply as AppDynamics Cloud.
The company is talking about the need to achieve what it calls ‘business transaction insights’, which seems like a strange term at first i.e. surely every observability insight is some form of business (or perhaps system) transaction insight, right?
Cisco says that business transaction insights combines business transaction monitoring with AppDynamics Cloud’s continuous-context experience. This allows organizations to expand observability over cloud-native applications correlated with business context across their Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment and beyond.
So, in other words, not just what’s happening at a technical level, but more of what it means in terms of the commercial bottom line.
AIOps-derived insights
The AIOps-derived insights enable teams to observe applications the same way customers and end users experience them and quickly take action to optimize performance and remediate issues in near real-time.
The new capabilities will initially support digital services, cloud-native applications and workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cisco AppDynamics and AWS continue to empower organizations across the entire IT estate on their journey to full-stack observability.
Modern cloud-native applications can be highly distributed and complex. Ops teams often have to rely on siloed, domain-specific tools to collect and interpret massive amounts of data generated by their technology stack during normal operations. As a result, they can struggle to deliver dependable digital experiences for end-user customers because they lack the correlated insights to identify how critical issues impact business outcomes.
“With AppDynamics Cloud, we are reimagining the cloud-native observability market,” said Ronak Desai SVP/GM Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco full-stack observability. “Cisco AppDynamics is enabling visibility of an organization’s entire cloud-native landscape and generating insights based on an intelligent relationship model. With the addition of business transaction insights to AppDynamics Cloud, IT teams can now act with the information needed to make business-critical decisions and break down the new siloes that exist across their cloud-native monitoring landscapes. We are helping customers realize the vision of Cisco Full-Stack Observability and bringing genuine visibility, insight, and actions to their entire IT environment.”
With business transaction insights, teams can leverage multiple streams of data drawn from OpenTelemetry and Amazon CloudWatch, all correlated to business context, and then optimize digital experiences at scale.
They generate AIOps-driven alerts that allow teams to identify, prioritize, and resolve the most important issues that could impact the user experience and the overall business.
A Cisco AppDynamics survey of 1,150 IT professionals suggested that 71% believe their organization will need to allocate resources toward observability of cloud-native applications and infrastructure.
So-called golden age of cloud?
What we are being told here is that the addition of this new capability in AppDynamics Cloud gives technologists the simplicity and insights they need to streamline operations, increase business value of AWS products and services and maximize current and future investments in areas including Kubernetes, microservices, and other AWS infrastructure.
That’s great.
But putting any cookie cutter one-size-fits all solution (tech vendors love to say unified and end-to-end as well let’s not forget) up against the coal face of real-world modern application data flows is rarely a perfect fit, if vendors like Cisco would pay just a little lip service to the fact that a) life is difficult b) cloud is difficult and c) life in cloud can be difficult then we might be able tol really look at where observability should go next over the next half decade… and that’s a period which AWS itself has called out as the so-called ‘golden age of cloud’, so let’s not tarnish that shine eh?
About Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater is a freelance journalist and corporate content creation specialist focusing on cross platform software application development as well as all related aspects software engineering, project management and technology as a whole. Adrian is a regular writer and blogger with Computer Weekly and others covering the application development landscape to detail the movers, shakers and start-ups that make the industry the vibrant place that it is. His journalistic creed is to bring forward-thinking, impartial, technology editorial to a professional (and hobbyist) software audience around the world. His mission is to objectively inform, educate and challenge - and through this champion better coding capabilities and ultimately better software engineering.