Cisco to gauge user experience with its cloud-management service

Cisco is taking steps to better control the performance and observability of cloud-based enterprise applications.

At the AWS re:Invent conference this week, Cisco said it has added a feature called business transaction insights to its AppDynamics Cloud system so it can more easily track performance of applications running on the AWS Cloud including on Kubernetes, microservices, and other AWS infrastructure.

Available since June, AppDynamics Cloud is a cloud-native service designed to observe applications and take action to remediate performance problems. It is built on OpenTelemetry, an emerging standard for data collection that helps to visualize and measure application performance from multiple data sources, said AppDynamics Executive CTO Gregg Ostrowski.

AppDynamics Cloud ingests metrics, events, logs, and traces generated from the enterprise environment—including network, databases, storage, containers, security, and cloud services—to make sense of the current state of the entire IT stack all the way to the end user. Actions can then be taken to optimize costs, maximize transaction revenue, and secure user and organizational data.

The system uses AI and machine learning to correlate information from across different domains to better understand application performance and infrastructure dependencies, and to quickly identify problems. The system also supports analytics to help understand why things are not working optimally and to predict when problems will occur.

AppDynamics Cloud supports cloud-native, managed environments on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and is expected to expand to include Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and other cloud providers.

With business transaction insights IT teams will have a view of how the application is performing and also how the end user experiences it, Ostrowski said.

“IT teams will be able to see where users log in, how they access the application, and then also be able to trigger notifications and alerts when there is a failure,” he said, to help organizations understand the impact that failure might have on the business.

Business transaction insight is initially targeted at AWS customers as AppDynamics Cloud integrates with AWS CloudWatch, but other cloud providers will be added in the future.

Business transaction insights capabilities will be available in the first quarter of 2023.