Cisco accelerates observability strategy with customer digital experience monitoring

With user experience increasingly being a key performance indicator at the boardroom level and claiming to be uniquely positioned to deliver industry-leading Full-Stack Observability to customers, Cisco has announced a new OpenTelemetry-based integration of its AppDynamics application observability and ThousandEyes network intelligence.

Explaining the launch of the solutions – for which integration is bi-directional, with data exchanged simultaneously between both solutions, in real time – the networking tech giant said organisations are working to ensure they can elevate digital experiences at scale via the applications “at the heart of all business interactions today”.

It also recognised user experience can be affected by many factors and that the key to enabling the optimal experience was to find the root cause of impact as soon as possible and address the issue before it reaches the end user and hurts the overall performance of the application and ultimately the business.

The firm added that the ability of companies to get a complete picture of their applications’ health and users’ journeys positions businesses to make better-informed decisions and resolve issues quicker, ultimately leading to better user experience and improved business outcomes.

The new Cisco solution is designed to provide insights into both the application and the network, with internet connectivity metrics for application operations and real-time application dependency mapping for network operations. It is automatically available without further installations, drives customer digital experience monitoring from the combined application and network vantage points, and delivers differentiated business outcomes.

It is also attributed with reducing significantly mean time to resolution (MTTR), closing observability gaps with actionable recommendations and helping teams prioritise network remediation based on business impact/criticality.

“Our customers are committed to delivering the best digital experiences for their businesses. However, as digital experiences get simpler for the consumers, they get more complex for companies,” said Liz Centoni, Cisco executive vice-president, chief strategy officer and general manager of applications.

“Customer Digital Experience Monitoring seamlessly brings together our industry leading application observability and our unparalleled network intelligence, so that customers can uncover all the application and network dependencies not visible before.”

The Customer Digital Experience Monitoring solution is intended to allow organisations to break down the barriers to meaningful collaboration that can exist between Infrastructure and operations teams, application developers, SecOps and DevSecOps teams; all of whom need to work more closely together to ensure success. This, said Cisco, will help organisations to move fast and focus on what matters most – driving revenue, elevating user experience, managing risk and reducing costs all while reducing tool sprawl.

Another key feature of the bi-directional integration is that it strengthen the ability to deliver customer digital experience monitoring when coupled with the real user monitoring (RUM) capability offered by end user digital behaviour technology provider Smartlook, a company that Cisco intends to acquire.

This combination is said to fulfil the expectations customers have to be able to enjoy end-to-end monitoring of an experience for user accessing applications and services hosted anywhere from any location using any device.

As part of what it says is a commitment to simplifying the buying experience, Cisco launched its Business Risk Observability pack in February 2023 and is included in the Cisco FSO Essentials bundle, which also includes critical full stack observability capabilities. 

The company is now announcing the Cisco FSO Advantage bundle, adding real-time ingestion of network intelligence metrics into application observability and real-time application dependencies for network operations.

This is intended to help customers deliver end-to-end visibility, correlated insights and recommended actions, all tied to business context, across application monitoring, application security, the network and the internet.