Cisco introduced groundbreaking business metrics for its Cloud Observability platform at AWS re:Invent 2023. This enhancement, specifically tailored for modern applications running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), is set to improve how businesses monitor and interpret application performance in relation to key business objectives.

The traditional landscape of application monitoring has often been limited to the technical aspects of performance, leaving a gap in understanding the direct impact on critical business KPIs, such as customer conversion rates and real-time business revenue effects. Cisco’s latest offering is designed to bridge this gap, providing businesses with the much-needed context to align IT operations with business goals more effectively.

Enhanced Business Context for Modern Applications

Cisco Cloud Observability now offers a comprehensive view that includes both application performance and critical business metrics. This dual focus allows for a more holistic approach to monitoring, enabling businesses to directly correlate digital experiences with business outcomes. This enhanced capability is particularly crucial for teams managing modern applications, including ITOps, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), who have traditionally struggled with a lack of visibility into how application performance affects business results.

Empowering Proactive Business Decisions

With this new capability, Cisco is empowering businesses to shift from a reactive to a proactive stance. According to Alice McElroy, Director of IT Operational Excellence at Royal Caribbean, the implementation of Cisco Full-Stack Observability has transformed their approach from being reactive to proactive. The ability to visualize and correlate various data types like metrics, events, logging, and tracing (MELT) enables faster identification, triage, and troubleshooting of issues.

Innovative Features for Improved Insight and Control

Key features of Cisco’s enhanced Cloud Observability include:

• Support for multiple business metrics within a business transaction.
• Simplified identification and troubleshooting of business transactions configured with business metrics.
• A user-friendly configuration interface for setting up critical metric alerts.
• Advanced KPI visualization tools for easy identification of abnormal business performance.
• Data segmentation for quick visibility of affected customer segments.

Integration with AWS Services

Further strengthening its offering, Cisco announced integration support for an additional 10 AWS services. This expanded support enhances cross-domain visibility, allowing application owners to gain a deeper understanding of how AWS infrastructure services impact business transactions and metrics.

A Step Forward in Full-Stack Observability

Ronak Desai, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability, emphasized the significance of this advancement. “By elevating business metrics to first-class status, similar to other performance-related metrics, we enable organizations to mature their observability practice by empowering technical teams to prioritize technical issues that are aligned with business outcomes,” he stated.

Engage with Cisco at AWS re:Invent 2023

Attendees of AWS re:Invent 2023 can experience live demos of Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability innovations at the Cisco booth (#680). These demonstrations include observability for modern applications, business risk observability for cloud-native applications, and an exploration of the extended capabilities on the Cisco Observability Platform. Additionally, Cisco product experts are hosting live sessions and meetings at the event.

Cisco’s latest enhancements to its Cloud Observability platform represent a significant advancement in the integration of business and application performance monitoring. This development is not just a technical upgrade but a strategic tool for businesses to align their IT operations with overarching business goals, ultimately driving improved decision-making, customer experiences, and financial outcomes.

Image: Cisco

---