Cisco Unfurls Observability Cloud for Kubernetes Environments

At its Cisco Live! event this week, Cisco added an AppDynamics Cloud observability service that is optimized for microservices-based applications constructed using containers.

Gregg Ostrowski, executive CTO for Cisco AppDynamics, says AppDynamics Cloud is designed to ingest logs, metrics, events and traces generated by both applications and the cloud infrastructure they run on to provide IT teams with a more holistic view of their environment. It initially supports managed Kubernetes environments on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with future support for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and other cloud providers planned.

As part of that effort, AppDynamics Cloud also supports the OpenTelemetry agent software that is being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to provide organizations with an open source approach to collecting telemetry data.

Cisco is also giving current AppDynamics customers the ability to upgrade to AppDynamics Cloud without replacing the existing agent software Cisco originally provided. AppDynamics began as an application performance management (APM) platform and is evolving into an observability platform.

Ostrowski says AppDynamics Cloud differs from rival observability platforms in that it provides support for correlating events to actual business transactions and processes. That approach makes it possible for IT teams to understand how individual users are being impacted by specific events, he adds.

In general, Ostrowski said appreciation for the need for observability platforms has increased in the last year, as more organizations deploy cloud-native applications. Observability platforms unify logs, metrics and traces to make it simpler to launch queries to identify the root cause of an IT issue. Today, most IT teams are still relying on multiple monitoring tools that surface a set of pre-defined but often conflicting metrics. The goal is to make it easier for IT teams to surface and address issues before they become a major disruption by providing greater visibility into the IT environment.

In many cases, cloud-native applications are forcing the shift toward observability because the dependencies that exist between microservices—and the underlying infrastructure on which they run—are too complex to track manually. Observability also paves the way toward greater adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in IT operations because there is now a common framework in place for aggregating data collection.

It’s too early to say how increased observability might transform the way IT teams are managed and structured, but there should be less time spent in war rooms every time there is some type of IT disruption. The root cause of an issue will be surfaced much faster than it is today. In fact, over time, many of the IT monitoring tools that IT teams rely on today will be subsumed into a larger observability framework.

There is already no shortage of observability platforms. IT teams, for the most part, are still playing catch-up in terms of how best to employ these platforms. The issue now is determining which of these platforms will be around for the long term in a space where competition between vendors is already fierce.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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