Why cloud-native observability is critical to providing world-class digital experiences

Companies across sectors indicate that they’ve been able to reduce digital development time from years to months, weeks, and even days in the aftermath of the epidemic, enabling the capacity to create best-in-class user experiences with a more significant competitive advantage than ever.

“While many businesses continue to operate mission-critical and revenue-generating systems with conventional applications, pandemic and hybrid work has hastened the shift toward DevOps projects for contemporary business apps,” says Joe Byrne, Executive CTO of Cisco AppDynamics. “This trend has made it simpler for IT teams to offer great digital service, creating a consumer and end-user experience revolution.”

According to a recent AppDynamics survey titled “The Journey to Observability,” 96 percent of engineers believe that being able to monitor their complete IT stack and directly correlate performance to business objectives is critical to creating first-class digital experiences. And 79% realize that the IT choices they make directly influence the business’s success.

Unfortunately, comprehensive, end-to-end visibility throughout an application ecosystem is challenging – there’s never been more going on beneath the hood in today’s contemporary company.

The contemporary IT (hay) stack

“To deliver the consistent, dependable digital experiences that consumers and end-users now expect,” says Byrne, “IT teams must monitor and manage a dynamic set of application dependencies across a mix of infrastructure, microservices, containers, and APIs using home-grown IT stacks, multiple clouds, SaaS services, and security solutions.” “In this massively complex and dynamic ecology, certain classic monitoring systems fail.”

Companies are turning to cloud-native technologies and distributed infrastructures with microservices and containerized components to help them grow. In addition, more third-party services, such as SaaS apps and public internet gateways, are being used by technologists to improve the end-user experience for their applications.

At the same time, possible security vulnerabilities remain a continuous challenge for highly dispersed and cloud-based systems, making application landscape management even more difficult. Because the current application stack is spread, determining the root cause of application performance problems may be like seeking for a needle in a haystack. According to 85 percent of engineers, cutting through the noise to determine what’s happening is a severe difficulty.

Obtaining full-stack visibility

Full-stack observability is the key to digital transformation, allowing teams to instantly pivot in the face of IT challenges while providing perfect client experiences. It offers real-time observability across the current technological stack, from applications and software-defined computers to storage, services, networks, and other components. It provides detailed insight into the app’s behavior, performance, health, and supporting infrastructure by collecting high-fidelity telemetry from the whole IT estate. As a result, IT can identify underlying problems in real-time, from third-party APIs down to the code level.

Operational silos may be broken down with extensive, end-to-end visibility throughout an application ecosystem. And with coordinated IT teams, engineers may solve issues before they impair the performance, prioritizing issues based on user and business effects. It also enables businesses to examine infrastructure costs and performance about key business KPIs such as conversions, allowing them to remedy problems before influencing the bottom line.

“IT teams can better cooperate in uncovering faults and enhancing application experiences by centralizing and correlating application performance information across the whole stack,” Byrne explains. “The capacity to monitor all technical areas throughout their IT stack and immediately relate performance to business results is now required to offer world-class digital experiences.”

Taking use of cloud-native observability

Observability platforms must keep up with the increasing complexity of distributed architectures and underlying services. Cisco AppDynamics, for example, just announced AppDynamics Cloud, a cloud-native observability platform intended to improve cloud-native applications.

AppDynamics Cloud collects and analyzes telemetry data across the IT stack to provide actionable insights into application performance and security. As a result, it gives the freedom, choice, and agility needed to create and deploy apps while improving the digital experience.

The platform facilitates communication across teams such as DevOps, site reliability engineers (SREs), and other business stakeholders to reach shared benchmarks such as service-level goals (SLOs) and organizational KPIs. AppDynamics Cloud customers may utilize AWS and Azure-supported services to design and deploy API-first apps that improve and extend the digital experience.

AppDynamics Cloud consumes the avalanche of metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) created in this environment — including network, databases, storage, containers, security, and cloud services — to understand the present condition of the whole IT stack to the end-user. Then, actions may be made to reduce expenses, increase transaction revenue, and safeguard user and corporate data.

Current AppDynamics customers may upgrade to AppDynamics Cloud and continue to use their existing APM agents or feed both platforms simultaneously. The platform supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-native, managed Kubernetes environments, with a planned extension to Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and other cloud providers.