Optimizing business velocity with Cisco Full-Stack Observability

Fueling digital transformation success with cost and resource optimization over applications, workloads, and components

Digital transformation comes with an irony that is not lost on the IT teams. Applications and the digital experiences they enable require cloud-based resources for which costs can easily spiral out of control. Worse, lack of visibility means that utilization of these resources can be difficult to accurately assess.

This creates a conundrum. Fast, reliable application performance depends on sufficient allocation of cloud resources to support demand, even when usage spikes. Under-resourcing in this area can cause significant performance challenges that result in very user experience. With this in mind, teams responsible for migrating workloads to the cloud or spinning up resources for new applications can often over-provision cloud resources to be on the safe side.

The more complexity that is introduced by sprawling suites of tools, containers, application programming interfaces (APIs), and serverless components, the more ways there are to incur costs. And the more ways there are to fall short of efficiency goals  as cloud resources sit idle.

As a result, technologists are under pressure to find out where costs are out of alignment and whether resources have been allocated in ways that support the business.

Taking the guesswork out of optimization

Cisco Full-Stack Observability allows operational teams to gain a broad understanding of system behavior, performance, and security threats across the entire application estate. It also equips them to understand and optimize cloud resource utilization. This optimization helps organizations lower costs by properly modulating asset utilization across workloads, paying only for what they need through right-sizing resource allocation.

It offers optimization capabilities for resolving poorly aligned cloud spend with actionable insights into hybrid costs and application resources within their established monitoring practices. While over-provisioning to avoid downtime is wasteful from both a budgetary and sustainability perspective, under-allocation presents a serious risk.

When applications are constrained by insufficient resources, the resulting poor application performance or even downtime can damage organizational reputation and revenues. With Cisco Full-Stack Observability, teams can scale up or down to ensure resources sufficiently support workloads.

Moreover, Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions provide visibility into application-level costs alongside performance metrics down to the pod level. It helps perform granular cost analysis of Kubernetes resources, allowing FinOps and CloudOps teams to understand the composition of their cloud spend as well as the cost of resources that are idle. Armed with granular cost insights, organizations can mitigate overspending on unused resources while ensuring that critical applications have adequate resources.

Driving optimization with AI and ML

Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving change in observability practices to improve both operational and business outcomes. Cisco Full-Stack Observability combines telemetry and business context so that AI and machine learning (ML) analytics can be uniformly applied. This allows IT Operations teams to extend their value and truly be strategic enablers for their business.

For example, application resource optimization with Cisco Full-Stack Observability takes aim at inefficiencies in Kubernetes workload resource utilization. By running continuous AI and ML experiments on workloads, it creates a utilization baseline, analyzing and identifying ways to optimize resource utilization. The resulting recommendations for improvement help to maximize resource usage and reduce excessive cloud spending.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability offers capabilities, moreover, to identify potential security vulnerabilities related to the application stack and optimize the stack against these threats. It continuously monitors for vulnerabilities within applications, business transactions, and libraries with the ability to find and block exploits automatically. The result is real-time optimization without constant manual intervention.

To understand and better manage the impact of risks on the business, Cisco security solutions use ML and data science to automate risk management at multiple layers. First, code dependencies, configuration-level security vulnerabilities, and leakage of sensitive data are continually assessed. Second, business priorities are established through a measurement of risk probability and business impact.

This comprehensive approach to optimization makes Cisco Full-Stack Observability a powerful solution for modern, digital-first organizations.

Source: cisco.com

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Protect Your Cloud Environments with Data Security Observability

Data is the new fuel for business growth

Data is at the heart of seemingly everything these days, from the smart devices in our homes to the mobile apps we use on the go every day. This wealth of information at our fingertips allows us to correlate data points and determine patterns and outcomes faster than humanly possible — enabling us to predict and quickly thwart adverse events on the horizon. We know that the volume of data collected by organizations is a goldmine of information that, when leveraged correctly, can empower growth. We also know that clean data, free of sensitive information, is critical for fueling GenAI initiatives across the globe. However, this uptick in data creation and usage also amplifies the need for organizations to ensure that they handle data responsibly and adhere to increasingly stringent data regulatory standards.

With astronomical amounts of data constantly being generated, tracked, and stored – it’s become more important than ever to secure it and be able to answer several key questions: Where is my data? Who is accessing my data? And is my data secure?

Introducing Observability for Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

The new Data Security module announced at Cisco Live 2024 Amsterdam is now generally available. It expands our business risk observability capabilities for cloud environments and delivers automated data discovery and classification in data stores like Snowflake and AWS S3. The new module provides real-time data insights that help visualize, prioritize, and act on security issues before they become revenue-impacting.

A quick look at the new data security capabilities:

◉ Discovery and classification of sensitive data: Easily identify all data stores and data entities, to quickly focus on securing sensitive data.

◉ Data access control: Understand which users, roles, and applications are accessing your data and who have access to personally identifiable information. Seamlessly adopt a least privilege approach by detecting unused privileges and locking down access to your data stores.

◉ Exfiltration attempt detection: Unlock GenAI-based detection and remediation guidance for data exfiltration attempts to stop attackers in their tracks.

◉ Identify security risks: Efficiently detect unencrypted buckets, dormant risky users and siloed unused data entities to reduce your overall security risk posture.

The future of data security

With data being created and moving at the speed of light every day, it can be overwhelming to keep track of exactly where the data is and how it’s being stored – let alone comprehensively securing it. Automation is imperative to keep up, and choosing the right tool will enable you to continue leveraging data and innovating while knowing your data is secure. The Data Security module provides teams with deep visibility and actionable insights to effortlessly protect data at scale. The future of data security relies on our ability to put adequate security controls in place now, so we can embrace the full potential of data and the unlimited capabilities that it unlocks.

Source: cisco.com

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Redefining the IT war room with end-to-end observability

Transforming the war room starts with Customer Digital Experience Monitoring (CDEM) to break down silos with correlated, cross-domain insights and efficiency for rapid resolutions.

Time is money and commandeering a lot of time from many of the smartest and most expensive people across your organization, often at short notice, can be unthinkably expensive.

There’s the hourly cost of their time. Plus, the cost of lost opportunities related to the work they’re doing, which is now delayed. That’s far from the full story though. The costs extend far beyond their own input as everybody needs time to speak, listen, consider, and work through the possibilities.

And yet, when a new software release rolls around, that’s exactly how many organizations respond. They can’t be sure what might go wrong with a software release, so they make sure all the right people are available, just in case.

When it’s obvious that something is going wrong in the application runtime environment, or a mission-critical application starts to experience performance problems, and it needs to be fixed immediately, that same wide group is gathered to figure out the problem and determine the best way to fix it.

Meanwhile, reputational damage to the company is growing with every minute of disruption, and the financial clock is ticking with each minute spent identifying and remediating issues while customers and end users have limited or no access to the applications that make modern business work.

The war room is a blunt instrument that casts a wide net 

Convening an IT war room is born of a lack of visibility. The team must leverage their collective expertise to determine the likely root cause of a performance-impacting issue, because it’s typically not obvious to anyone at the outset exactly where the problem lies.

The time required to pinpoint the issue can be significant, even when the war room is filled with skilled, intelligent subject matter experts. That’s because modern applications are built on cloud-native architectures and can be accessed from anywhere using different devices. They leverage packaged code and dependencies deployed as microservices to increase developer speed and flexibility.

That includes containers, third-party libraries, and application programming interfaces (APIs) which create a complicated environment in which updates, changes, and conflicts between dependencies need to be constantly managed to ensure applications run optimally. If the application slows down, doesn’t work as it should, or crashes, the result is poor user experience and even lost business.

Application dependencies can also affect the security of an application. This is particularly true when an application depends on third-party code or libraries which could contain vulnerabilities which offer an attack path. That puts not only the application, but also user data, at risk.

For example, misconfiguration and even ransomware or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks can all present confusingly similar symptoms as network packet loss in terms of performance degradation, with no clear indication of the root cause.

Consider the scenario of a large supermarket at the height of holiday season shopping. Products are flying off the shelves and need frequent restocking throughout the day. It’s critical to know inventory availability right up to the minute, so shelves remain full. Inaccurate inventory or running out of stock undermines trust the business has worked hard to build, not to mention lost sales.

At that point, the hand scanners used for inventory start to falter. They’re not reliably scanning, which means the movement of products from the stock room onto the shelves isn’t being recorded accurately. The team can no longer be sure what’s on the shelves, what’s left in the stockroom, what needs to be reordered and when it needs to arrive.

A call is made to the IT team and a war room is convened to investigate what’s causing the problem. The Wi-Fi network is an obvious culprit, however as time passes, the networking team can’t find any Wi-Fi problems. Eventually, they realize it’s the scanner firmware. The scanners themselves need to be replaced, and once they are, normal service is resumed.

Customer Digital Experience Monitoring (CDEM) changes everything  

This story is one of many that illustrate the shortcomings of infrastructure monitoring which lacks visibility into the digital experience.

In this example, the war room participants must sequentially sort through all the different scanner dependencies according to their collective experience to spot the most likely culprit, in the least amount of time. The effort involves cross-functional teams, who each investigate their area of responsibility, so there’s a similar level of effort and time required from everyone. The result is that most teams can typically prove their “innocence” — that is, they can show that their area of responsibility does or does not harbor the root cause.

In effect, because they lack clear insight, each team spends a huge amount of expensive time looking for an issue that isn’t theirs to find. There’s a better way. Cisco Full-Stack Observability allows operational teams to completely change their troubleshooting perspective.

Customer Digital Experience Monitoring (CDEM), a capability of Cisco Full-Stack Observability (FSO) solutions, allows teams to track the user journey itself starting with the device and traversing every touchpoint including dependencies like APIs and microservices.

Had they used CDEM, the teams in our example would have seen the user journey failing at the first step. Eliminating their theoretical most likely culprit – the Wi-Fi network – would have taken just moments instead of hours, and attention would have immediately focused on the scanners themselves.

It’s easy to see how observability at this level fundamentally changes the IT war room, and dramatically accelerates mean time to resolution (MTTR) through bypassing many of the steps that teams would otherwise have to take.

Answers lie in observable telemetry data

War rooms are complicated by multiple different data sets surfaced by separate monitoring tools. For example, Network Ops looks at data from the network, DevSecOps looks at data from the application and third-party dependencies.

Achieving a complete view of all relevant application data from normal business operations is a massive task. Worse yet, it’s impossible to correlate these endless streams of incoming data within a workable timeframe using disparate tools and systems that were never designed for the job. That makes spotting anomalies across the full stack, let alone prioritizing and acting on them, virtually impossible in a reasonable timeframe.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions democratize data access, breaking down cross-functional silos and bringing teams together to collaborate on the next best step for resolving problems. Customer Digital Experience Monitoring combines Cisco’s application observability capabilities with industry-leading network intelligence, allowing IT teams to quickly identify the root cause of issues before they hurt the overall performance of the application, affect the end user and ultimately the business.

Cisco’s solution provides insights into both the application and the network, with internet connectivity metrics for application operations and real-time application dependency mapping for network operations. This combined application and network view significantly reduces MTTR with actionable recommendations that help teams prioritize remediation activities based on business impact and criticality.

For instance, teams can see at which point along the user’s path performance degradation is occurring, or communication is failing altogether. Vitally, they have contextual visibility that helps them collaboratively identify, triage, and resolve issues because they’re all working from the same data sourced from every possible touchpoint, including the network, which is an area often missing from other solutions.

The result is the end of war rooms as we know them. Instead, teams have end-to-end visibility, correlated insights, and recommended actions all tied to business context, across applications, security, the network, and the internet. Only Cisco combines the vantage points of applications, networking, and security at scale to power true observability over the entire IT estate.

Source: cisco.com

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New bundles make it easy to start your Cisco Full-Stack Observability journey

In the last few months, Cisco has launched a lot of new capabilities around Cisco Full-Stack Observability (Cisco FSO) that activate important use cases around observability.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability Innovations

It started  with the launch of application security for hybrid applications with business risk observability  back in January, that brings business context to Cisco’s application security solution. The business risk score enables your security and application teams to have expanded threat visibility and intelligent business risk prioritization to respond instantly to revenue-impacting security risks and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.

Then in May, Cisco launched a pre-built, bi-directional integration of Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes that activated customer digital experience monitoring and application dependency monitoring. These use cases bring application observability and network intelligence data together and help in reducing friction between AppOps and NetOps team. They provide end-to-end insights among application, network, and data teams. They optimize joint operations for triage and troubleshooting application issues while helping teams understand how applications, network and multi-cloud environments affect digital user experience.

Most recently in June, Cisco announced the general availability of an open, extensible and API-driven platform, called Cisco FSO Platform. It is focused on OpenTelemetry and anchored on metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT). It provides AI/ML driven analytics  so that you can do dynamic baselining, anomaly detection, root cause analysis and prioritization. You can build custom use cases based on your needs and create an observability ecosystem that will help you to deliver relevant and impactful business insights. Using the platform, Cisco has activated cost and resource optimization use cases that can help you to understand your cloud spend and how you can optimize your workloads and reduce costs.

Last month, Cisco has extended application security and business risk observability to cloud native application environments. With all these new innovations, you can now observe, secure and optimize applications and create custom observability use cases  using Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability Bundles

With all these new capabilities, we are also simplifying how you can buy our solutions. Instead of buying separate software licenses for Cisco AppDynamics, Cisco ThousandEyes and Cisco Secure Application individually, you can buy Cisco Full-Stack Observability bundles to solve multiple use cases. We provide discounts for buying these bundles. And attaching Cisco services to these bundles increases your overall discount.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability bundles

FSO Essentials Bundle

Observe, secure and extend your observability by bringing together application performance and security data. This bundles together the following use cases:

◉ Hybrid Application Monitoring

◉ Modern Application Monitoring

◉ Application Security

◉ Extend observability with custom use cases on Cisco FSO Platform

FSO Advantage Bundle

Observe, secure and extend your observability by bringing together application performance, network intelligence and security data. This bundles together all the use cases in Essentials with the following additional use cases:

◉ Customer Digital Experience Monitoring

◉ Application Dependency Monitoring

FSO Premier Bundle

Observe, secure, optimize and extend your observability by bringing together application performance and cost, network intelligence and security data. This bundles together all the use cases in Advantage with the following additional use cases:

◉ Hybrid Cost Optimization

◉ Application Resource Optimization

Accelerate business outcomes with Cisco Services

With Cisco Full-Stack Observability capabilities, you may be wondering how to implement such a powerful solution. You don’t have to do it alone. To help you accelerate your outcomes, Cisco CX delivers the expertise and guidance to help you best leverage your existing monitoring and observability tools with Cisco Full-Stack Observability to remove blind spots, move beyond siloed domain monitoring, and take advantage of full stack visibility, insights, and actions. Through a variety of service offerings such as the , we can help you innovate at each step of your full-stack observability transformation journey. And by showcasing results through real-world use cases, you’ll see how Cisco FSO services and the value of CX expertise can help you confidently and continuously transform and optimize the application experience for your customers and employees, anywhere.

Source: cisco.com

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Evolutio FinTech module on Cisco FSO Platform gives visibility to financial transactions

We’re all aware that user experience has become the most important KPI for today’s digital businesses. Applications are the engines that power these experiences, and if a digital interaction is sub-par, customers are unforgiving.  Consider the situation of a prominent bank that recently suffered a series of downtimes on its mobile applications. Their users were not happy and  rival credit unions were advertising, highlighting their level of service compared to the “mega-bank.”  Churning customers due to digital blips is a NO-NO today. Organizations need visibility, context and control, so they can ensure that their customers are empowered with the best experiences possible. But true observability requires more than a “one size fits all” approach. Today’s application environments are highly specialized, built to support specific industries and business processes.

Observability tailored to fit specific use cases

Given the diversity and complexity of today’s modern apps, how can organizations fully align their technology to specific use case needs? Cisco FSO Platform brings data together from multiple domains including application, networking, infrastructure, security, cloud, sustainability, and business sources. It is an open and extensible, API-driven platform focused on OpenTelemetry and anchored on metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT), providing AI/ML driven analytics.

The Cisco ecosystem of partners plays a key role in enabling this flexibility by creating custom observability solutions that help customers drive business outcomes with specific use cases. Let’s take a closer look at the Evolutio Fintech module, built by a key Cisco technology partner.

Evolutio Fintech gives holistic visibility to online financial transactions

Every moment matters in financial services, especially in online and point of sale transactions. Financial services organizations need to be able to see the full picture—and take action with insight.

The Evolutio Fintech module correlates infrastructure health with credit card authorization data. It helps organizations reduce revenue losses resulting from credit card authorization failures by figuring out the impact of infrastructure health on the credit card authorization.

“We developed a Fintech solution for the banking sector, around credit card processing,” said, Laura Vetter, CTO and Co-Founder of Evolutio. “It looks at credit card processing, how much money is running through, and the number of transactions, split by customer region data centers, which is most relevant to the business. If someone calls in and has an issue with processing, it’s easy to look at that specific company’s data and determine whether the issue involves the whole company, or just one region.”

Evolutio lets financial organizations view credit card authorization projects by region, to spot issues like falling numbers of authorizations, or regions that have stopped reporting data.

Evolutio lets organizations view KPIs and insights grouped and aggregated based on metadata like region, schemas, infrastructure components, and merchant name, to understand how their system is behaving as a whole.

A powerful partnership for technology innovators

For our technology partners, Cisco FSO Platform presents an excellent opportunity to bring new solutions to market fast, supporting specific domain and vertical use cases.

“Cisco has provided a very easy way to interact with the platform,” said Vetter. “It’s basically just a schema that you interact with and extend to make it happen. My team keeps telling me about the tight partnership that we have had throughout this entire journey.”

Our customers win, too, gaining the interoperability, agility, and flexibility of an adaptable, highly modular platform.

Together, Cisco FSO Platform and its partner modules deliver a comprehensive solution that scales as businesses scale—and easily extends everywhere, across the infrastructure and the application life cycle.

Source: cisco.com

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Taming AI Frontiers with Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform

The Generative AI Revolution: A Rapidly Changing Landscape

The public unveiling of ChatGPT has changed the game, introducing a myriad of applications for Generative AI, from content creation to natural language understanding. This advancement has put immense pressure on enterprises to innovate faster than ever, pushing them out of their comfort zones and into uncharted technological waters. The sudden boom in Generative AI technology has not only increased competition but has also fast-tracked the pace of change. As powerful as it is, Generative AI is often provided by specific vendors and frequently requires specialized hardware, creating challenges for both IT departments and application developers.

It is not a unique situation with technology breakthroughs, but the scale and potential for disruption in all areas of business is truly unprecedented. With proof-of-concept projects easier than ever to demonstrate potential with ChatGPT prompt-engineering, the demand for building new technologies using Generative AI was unprecedented. Companies are still walking a tight rope, balancing between safety of compromising their intellectual properties and confidential data and urge to move fast and leverage the latest Large Language Models to stay competitive.

Kubernetes Observability

Kubernetes has become a cornerstone in the modern cloud infrastructure, particularly for its capabilities in container orchestration. It offers powerful tools for the automated deployment, scaling, and management of application containers. But with the increasing complexity in containers and services, the need for robust observability and performance monitoring tools becomes paramount. Cisco’s Cloud Native Application Observability Kubernetes and App Service Monitoring tool offers a solution, providing comprehensive visibility into Kubernetes infrastructure.

Many enterprises have already adopted Kubernetes as a major way to run their applications and products both for on-premise and in the cloud. When it comes to deploying Generative AI applications or Large Language Models (LLMs), however, one must ask: Is Kubernetes the go-to platform? While Cloud Native Application Observability provides an efficient way to gather data from all major Kubernetes deployments, there’s a hitch. Large Language Models have “large” in the name for a reason. They are massive, compute resource-intensive systems. Generative AI applications often require specialized hardware, GPUs, and big amounts of memory for functioning—resources that are not always readily available in Kubernetes environments, or the models are not available in every place.

Infrastructure Cloudscape

Generative AI applications frequently push enterprises to explore multiple cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, and Azure, rather than sticking to a single provider. AWS is probably the most popular cloud provider among enterprise, but Azure’s acquisition of OpenAI and making GPT-4 available as part of their cloud services was ground breaking. With Generative AI it is not uncommon for enterprises to go beyond one cloud, often spanning different services in AWS, GCP, Azure and hosted infrastructure. However, GCP and AWS are expending their toolkits from a standard pre-GPT MLOps world to fully- managed Large Language Models, Vector databases, and other newest concepts. So we will potentially see even more fragmentation in enterprise cloudscapes.

Troubleshooting distributed applications spanning across cloud and networks may be a dreadful task consuming engineering time and resources and affecting businesses. Cisco Cloud Native Application Observability provides correlated full-stack context across domains and data types. It is powered by Cisco FSO Platform, which provide building blocks to make sense of the complex data landscapes with an entity-centric view and ability to normalize and correlate data with your specific domains.

Beyond Clouds

As Generative AI technologies continue to evolve, the requirements to utilize them efficiently are also becoming increasingly complex. As many enterprises learned, getting a project from a very promising prompt-engineered proof of concept to a production-ready scalable service may be a big stretch. Fine-tuning and running inference tasks on these models at scale often necessitate specialized hardware, which is both hard to come by and expensive. The demand for specialized, GPU-heavy hardware, is pushing enterprises to either invest in on-premises solutions or seek API-based Generative AI services. Either way, the deployment models for advanced Generative AI often lie outside the boundaries of traditional, corporate-managed cloud environments.

To address these multifaceted challenges, Cisco FSO Platform emerges as a game-changer, wielding the power of OpenTelemetry (OTel) to cut through the complexity. By providing seamless integrations with OTel APIs, the platform serves as a conduit for data collected not just from cloud native applications but also from any applications instrumented with OTel. Using the OpenTelemetry collector or dedicated SDKs, enterprises can easily forward this intricate data to the platform. What distinguishes the platform is its exceptional capability to not merely accumulate this data but to intelligently correlate it across multiple applications. Whether these applications are scattered across multi-cloud architectures or are concentrated in on-premises setups, Cisco FSO Platform offers a singular, unified lens through which to monitor, manage, and make sense of them all. This ensures that enterprises are not just keeping pace with the Generative AI revolution but are driving it forward with strategic insight and operational excellence.

Bridging the Gaps with Cisco Full-Stack Observability

Cisco FSO Platform serves as a foundational toolkit to meet your enterprise requirements, regardless of the complex terrains you traverse in the ever-evolving landscape of Generative AI. Whether you deploy LLM models on Azure OpenAI Services, operate your Generative AI API and Authorization services on GCP, build SaaS products on AWS, or run inference and fine-tune tasks in your own data center – the platform enables you to cohesively model and observe all your applications and infrastructure and empowers you to navigate the multifaceted realm of Generative AI with confidence and efficiency.

Cisco FSO Platform extends its utility by offering seamless integrations with multiple partner solutions, each contributing unique domain expertise. But it doesn’t stop there—it also empowers your enterprise to go a step further by customizing the platform to cater to your unique requirements and specific domains. Beyond just Kubernetes, multi-clouds, and Application Performance Monitoring, you gain the flexibility to model your specific data landscape, thereby transforming this platform into a valuable asset for navigating the intricacies and particularities of your Generative AI endeavors.

Source: cisco.com

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Launch of Cisco FSO Platform Unifies and Secures Digital Experiences at Scale

Today at Cisco Live, we announced the Cisco FSO Platform, an open and extensible, API-driven Full-Stack Observability (FSO) platform built on OpenTelemetry and anchored on metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT). Advancing our Cisco Full-Stack Observability strategy, it provides AI/ML driven analytics as well as a new observability ecosystem delivering relevant and impactful business insights.

With digital experience increasingly considered a key performance indicator (KPI) at the boardroom level, the ability to unify and secure those experiences at-scale is now at the heart of all business interactions, which are now the touchpoint that companies use to connect to customers and end users. Simply put, today applications are the business.

Amid the growing reliance on applications, IT teams are feeling the pressure to ensure problems at the network or application layer do not lead to security or performance issues down the line. Developers are expected to create flawless applications and use application programming interfaces (APIs) that are secure and functional, with little room for error. For teams meeting these expectations consistently and at scale, however, is extremely challenging. Tool sprawl is real. In a just released study by IDC, with input from over 2000 organizations around the globe, they found that teams can use anywhere between 10 and up to 100 different monitoring and observability tools. This is a big barrier to collecting, managing, understanding, and sharing data. This results in delayed issue resolution including delays in threat detection and mitigation. Tool sprawl also compounds existing issues in organizations where siloed teams and siloed processes lead to higher TCO of technology with suboptimal delivery. Observability can become the primary way to reduce friction between teams by unifying data, analysis, actions, and practices. Achieving this through observability enables operational efficiency, ensures great user experience and lowers business risk. This is why IDC notes in the same study: Observability is becoming established as a key tactical and strategic function with vital benefits, executive support, and rising budgets.

Introducing Cisco FSO Platform

Cisco is uniquely positioned to deliver full-stack observability to customers. More than any other company, Cisco is defining the market. Cisco FSO Platform offers cross-domain visibility that brings teams together with real-time ingestion of massive data streams of MELT from normal business operations.

Most importantly, it provides a view relative to business context. According to Gartner regarding the broader applied observability movement, “When applied systematically, it can reduce the latency for response and optimize business operations in real time.” With the Cisco FSO Platform, business context becomes an integral part of monitoring and visibility outcomes.

A vendor-agnostic solution, Cisco FSO Platform brings data together from application, networking, infrastructure, security, cloud, sustainability, and business sources. Customers get in-context, correlated, and predictive insights so they can reduce time to resolve issues, optimize experiences and minimize business risk.

In addition, it provides the flexibility of extending Cisco FSO Platform for creation of new or custom business use cases including monitoring and analysis of APIs. It enables extensibility from queries, data ingestion pipelines, and entity models all the way to APIs and a composable UI framework.

Cisco FSO Platform extensibility means developers can build their own observability solutions that natively correlate and integrate with other signals and modules. It also equips developers with a seamless extension of Cisco’s entity-centric model, allowing them to collect and analyze MELT data generated by any source – not just applications and hosts.

Developers can use the platform to enrich existing entities, their attributes, and relationships, or to create new ones. These capabilities make it easy to create, launch, and monetize custom use cases as modules on Cisco FSO Platform, spawning an ecosystem of more customers and partners.

Cisco FSO Platform Applications

Cloud Native Application Observability is the premier solution delivered on Cisco FSO Platform. Cisco’s application performance management (APM) solution for cloud native architectures, it helps customers achieve business outcomes in their own context, make the right digital experiences-related decisions, ensure performance alignment with end-user expectations, prioritize and reduce risk, and secure workloads.

The first set of applications on Cisco FSO Platform, and built by Cisco, are Cost Insights from Cisco, Application Resource Optimizer from Cisco, Security Insights from Cisco, and Cisco AIOps.

Working with partners to develop and monetize a diverse ecosystem of solutions for Cisco FSO Platform, we are partnering to enable meaningful, new use cases and deliver customer value from observable telemetry. For example, launch partners CloudFabrix, Evolutio, and Kanari have built novel solutions that extend Cisco’s FSO Platform reach to new customers and new business objectives.

Ultimately, it’s a solution whose time has come. Cisco FSO Platform accelerates and extends Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability strategy, which allows teams to bring together telemetry data from their own context and drive correlated insights across the entire IT estate with business context.

It makes it possible to move faster to identify, prioritize, and remediate potential problems in near real-time with insights correlated to business context. Delivering outstanding, reliable, secure digital experiences that are true drivers of business is no longer an abstract “concept” — with Cisco FSO Platform it’s business as usual.

Source: cisco.com

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Empowering an extensible observability ecosystem with the Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform

Businesses today are digitally led, providing experiences to their customers and consumers through applications. The environments these applications are built upon are complex and evolve rapidly — requiring that IT teams, security teams, and business leaders can observe all aspects of their applications’ performance and be able to tie that performance to clear business outcomes. This calls for a new type of platform that can scale as a business scale and easily extend across an organization’s entire infrastructure and application lifecycle. It’s critical for leaders to have complete visibility, context and control of their applications to ensure their stakeholders — from employees to business partners to customers — are empowered with the best experiences possible.

What is Cisco Full-Stack Observability (FSO) Platform?

The Cisco FSO Platform is an open and extensible, API-driven full stack observability (FSO) platform focused on OpenTelemetry and anchored on metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT), providing AI/ML driven analytics as well as a new observability ecosystem delivering relevant and impactful business insights through new use-cases and extensions.

Benefits of The Cisco FSO Platform

Cisco’s FSO Platform is future-proof and vendor agnostic, bringing data together from multiple domains — including application, networking, infrastructure, security, cloud, sustainability — and business sources. It is a unified observability platform enabling extensibility from queries, data ingestion pipelines and entity models all the way to APIs and a composable UI framework.

This provides Cisco customers with in-context, correlated, and predictive insights which enables them to reduce time to resolve issues, optimize their own users’ experiences, and minimize business risk — all with the additional flexibility to extend the Cisco FSO Platform’s capabilities with the creation of new or customized business use cases. This extensibility unleashes a diverse ecosystem of developers who can create new solutions or build upon existing ones to rapidly add value with observability, telemetry, and actionable insights.

Cisco FSO Platform Diagram

First Application on the Cisco FSO Platform – Cloud Native Application Observability

Cloud Native Application Observability is a premier solution delivered on the Cisco FSO Platform. Cisco’s extensible application performance management (APM) solution for cloud native architectures, Cloud Native Application Observability with business context – now on the Cisco FSO Platform – helps customers achieve business outcomes, make the right digital experiences related decisions, ensure performance alignment with end-user expectations, prioritize, and reduce risk while securing workloads.

The following are some of the modules built on Cisco FSO Platform that work with Cloud Native Application Observability.

Modules built by Cisco

Cost Insights: This module provides visibility and insights into application-level costs alongside performance metrics, helping businesses understand the fiscal impact of their cloud applications. It leverages advanced analytics and automation to identify and eliminate unnecessary costs, while also supporting sustainability efforts.

Application Resource Optimizer: This module provides deeper insights into a Kubernetes workload and provides visibility into the workload’s resource utilization. It helps to identify the best candidates for optimization—and reduce your resource utilization. Running continuous AI/ML experiments on workloads, the Application Resource Optimizer creates a utilization baseline, and offers specific recommendations to help you improve. It analyzes and optimizes application workloads to maximize resource usage and reduce excessive cloud spending.

Security Insights: This module provides Business Risk Observability for cloud-native applications. It provides cloud native infrastructure insights to locate threats and vulnerabilities; runtime data security to detect and protect against leakage of sensitive data; and business risk prioritization for cloud security. By integrating features from our market-leading portfolio of security solutions, security and application teams have expanded threat visibility, and the intelligent business risk insights to respond in real-time to revenue-impacting security risks and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.

Cisco AIOps: This module helps to visualize contextualized data relevant to infrastructure, network, incidents, and performance of a business application, all in one place. It simplifies and optimizes the IT operations needs and accelerates time-to market for customer-specific AIOps capabilities and requirements.

Modules built by Partners

Evolutio Fintech: This module helps to reduce revenue losses for financial customers resulting from credit card authorization failures. It monitors infrastructure health impact on hourly credit card authorizations aggregated based on metadata like region, schemas, infra components and merchants.

CloudFabrix vSphere Observability and Data Modernization: This module helps to observe vSphere through the FSO platform and enriches vShpere and vROps data with your environment’s Kubernetes and infrastructure data.

Kanari Capacity Planner and Forecaster: This module provides insights into infrastructure risk factors that have been determined through predictive ML algorithms (ARIMA, SARIMA, LSTM). It helps to derive capacity forecasts and plans using these insights and baseline capacity forecast to analyze changing capacity needs overtime.

Source: cisco.com

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Evolution towards Full-Stack Observability

Applications are the front door for virtually every business, and they are under pressure to accelerate their digital transformation projects. Flawless application experience is a top priority, and 84% report that the need to maintain the performance of business applications is now more important than ever.

Modern Applications are complex

However, it is also more complicated than ever. Modern applications are built on top of microservices, running on cloud-native and hybrid cloud architectures, which are based on massively decentralized services, ultimately creating a complex and rapidly evolving environment. A small issue in one service can have a cumulative effect on the overall experience.

The information and experience required to operate these environments is scattered and siloed across different tools and teams. This reduces the ability to identify, prioritize, and effectively address the issues that are directly impacting the user experience and most likely the business and its brand and reputation.

Monitoring to Visibility to Full-Stack Observability

As applications are becoming more complex, the way we monitor and observe them should also change.

Earlier, we had monitoring – when each team had their own dashboard, which was built based on passive access of information, usually alerts and events that typically are built into the dashboard based on sampling. The main KPI that organizations were looking at was availability.

Then the industry evolved towards visibility – more active ingestion of Telemetry. In particular, the addition of metrics, events and logs, and root-cause analysis. But still each team or domain had their own tool. Performance was the main KPI for visibility.

Now industry is building on monitoring and visibility, into Full-Stack Observability. Business context is getting added to the conversation. In addition to metrics, events and logs, tracing is added for measuring the experience end-to-end for cloud-native applications. Security also comes to the forefront with FSO. But the most important change we are seeing in the market today is the ability to do full-stack observability across multiple domains and multiple teams because traditional monitoring and/or silo visibility does not work in a world that is driven by hybrid or cloud-native deployments. Full-Stack Observability provides business context with availability and performance so that you can monitor the experience.

Source: cisco.com

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