Cisco expands full-stack observability ecosystem

Networking giant Cisco has announced seven new modules on its Observability Platform, looking to help customers fulfil their specific observability needs and utilise additional value from observable telemetry.

First announced in February 2023 and launched for general availability in June 2023, Cisco Full-Stack Observability is designed to allow teams to bring together telemetry data from their own context and drive correlated insights across the entire IT estate, whether they are DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers, cloud ops, ITOps, line of business or members of C-suite management.

As IT and application environments become ever more complex, observability – the ability to see and get ahead of network-based issues and everything in the tech stack that could affect customer experience – has become a board-level imperative.

Cisco said the background to the launch in February was the battle among consumer brands to gain market share by focusing on the experience customers have in accessing their products and services. This is quickly reaching into the enterprise arena, whereby hybrid workers expect the capability of their IT services to be identical wherever they are. As these expectations increase, Cisco said it was aiming to allow firms to deliver the required digital experiences by staff, customers and partners alike.

The company now says that modern businesses are digitally led, with customer and user experiences achieved with and through applications. It believes the speed and complexity of how these applications are built demands that IT teams, security teams and business leaders observe all aspects of application performance and experience in real time. Yet the company cited a recent IDC report showing 60% of IT professionals are worried that most observability tools serve narrow requirements, failing to give IT teams a complete view into current and trending operating conditions. Further, 65% stated the need for a programmable and extensible observability solution that could be used for use cases specific to their own business.

As a solution, the new open, extensible and API-driven stack was built by Cisco’s development partners and created to expand its full-stack observability ecosystem. The new modules are focused on five critical areas: business insights, SAP visibility, networking, MLOps and service-level objectives (SLO), and sustainability.

Business insights functions aim to correlate telemetry data with business performance across multiple domains, providing customers with full visibility and insights on how business interacts with IT. The new platform can now help customers achieve holistic observability across often changeable, expanding and complex SAP landscapes and ecosystems and use Cisco’s networking expertise to correlate key network telemetry with business metrics and application stacks.

With the growing use of generative AI and the mainstreaming of modern applications, the Cisco Observability Platform is also designed to allow customers to monitor these applications, their SLO and bring the monitoring of large language models (LLMs), and MLOps models together with application observability. Cisco also sees the upgrade as being able to help assist customers achieve their sustainability goals by providing data around the carbon footprint across multiple IT domains and help optimise around energy consumption.

Commenting on the launch of the new modules and what they could deliver, Will Townsend, vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy said: “Full-stack observability is unlocking a host of use cases that are providing enterprises with deeper levels of cross-domain visibility for improved application performance, network insights, security postures and assurance. The resulting benefits of reducing risk and improving the resilience of IT infrastructure are immeasurable. [The Cisco Observability Platform] ecosystem has the potential to provide a diverse set of solutions that can help customers reduce tool sprawl and more proactively manage business operations through partner-led observability practices.”

New modules available immediately covering these capabilities are: CloudFabrix - SAP Observability; CloudFabrix - Campus Analytics; Evolutio – Claims; Evolutio – eCommerce; DataRobot – MLOps by Evolutio; Climatiq - Cloud Carbon Insights; Nobl9 – Service Level Objectives (SLO).