By Cauley Sutton
Cisco's Full-Stack Observability (FSO) strategy is based on a comprehensive suite of tools and services designed to help organizations monitor and manage their IT infrastructure, applications, and services. With Cisco’s FSO suite, IT teams can gain insights into their systems' health, identify issues, and take proactive steps to ensure optimal performance.
Cisco’s FSO suite consists of several components that work together seamlessly to provide a comprehensive view of an organization's IT environment. These components include:
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Cisco AppDynamics: is an application performance management (APM) solution that helps IT teams identify and resolve application performance issues before they impact users. AppDynamics provides real-time visibility into application performance, user experience, and business outcomes, allowing teams to quickly pinpoint the root cause of issues and take action.
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Cisco ThousandEyes: is a cloud-based network monitoring solution that provides deep visibility into network performance, including public and private cloud environments, WANs, and the Internet. ThousandEyes allows IT teams to identify and resolve network issues quickly, reducing downtime and improving the user experience.
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Cisco Meraki: is a cloud-managed IT solution that provides centralized management and monitoring of network infrastructure, security, and endpoint devices. With Meraki, IT teams can quickly deploy and manage network devices, monitor network performance, and enforce security policies across the organization.
Together, these components provide a comprehensive view of an organization's IT environment, allowing IT teams to monitor and manage their systems proactively. Cisco’s FSO suite is designed to be flexible and scalable, making it suitable for organizations of all sizes and industries.
As an engineer, you know how important it is to have reliable and effective tools to help you monitor and optimize your company's technology infrastructure. One of the key benefits of the FSO suite is its ability to provide real-time insights into IT systems. With this suite, IT teams can detect and resolve issues before they impact users, reducing downtime and improving the user experience. Additionally, the FSO suite can help organizations optimize their IT infrastructure, ensuring that resources are being used efficiently and effectively.
Two of the tools in the Cisco FSO suite that have gained popularity in recent years are Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes. We'll explore the benefits of these two tools and how they can help engineers like you streamline your work and improve your company's operations.
Cisco AppDynamics: Improving Application Performance:
Cisco AppDynamics is a tool designed to help you monitor and analyze the performance of your company's applications. With this tool, you can gain insights into how your applications are performing, identify bottlenecks, and optimize your code to improve application speed and reliability.
One of the key benefits of AppDynamics is its ability to provide real-time visibility into your application's performance. You can quickly see how your application is performing, identify issues, and take action to resolve them before they impact your users. With AppDynamics, you can also set up alerts to notify you of performance issues, allowing you to proactively address them.
Another benefit of AppDynamics is its ability to help you understand how your application's performance impacts your business. You can see how your application is affecting your customers, track user behavior, and analyze business metrics to identify opportunities for optimization and improvement.
AppDynamics also integrates with other tools, such as Jenkins and JIRA, allowing you to streamline your development workflow and easily track issues and bugs.
Features of Cisco AppDynamics:
- Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
AppDynamics' APM capabilities provide visibility into the performance of your applications, helping you identify and diagnose issues quickly. It provides detailed insights into how your applications are performing, including response times, throughput, error rates, and more.
- Business Performance Monitoring (BPM)
AppDynamics' BPM capabilities allow you to monitor the business impact of application performance issues. It helps you understand how application performance is affecting your bottom line, by tracking metrics such as conversions, revenue, and user satisfaction.
- End-User Monitoring (EUM)
AppDynamics' EUM capabilities allow you to monitor the end-user experience of your applications. It provides real-time insights into how users are interacting with your applications, helping you identify and address issues that may be impacting user satisfaction.
- Infrastructure Visibility
AppDynamics provides visibility into the underlying infrastructure supporting your applications, including servers, databases, and network components. This allows you to identify and troubleshoot performance issues that may be related to infrastructure.
- Machine Learning
AppDynamics leverages machine learning algorithms to automatically identify anomalies and patterns in application performance data. This allows you to proactively identify and address performance issues before they impact users.
Cisco ThousandEyes: Monitoring Network Performance
Cisco ThousandEyes is a cloud-based network performance monitoring tool that provides real-time visibility into your company's network. It uses a combination of synthetic and real-user monitoring to provide insights into how your network is performing, from the end-user perspective, across various network boundaries including the cloud, WAN, and Internet.
One of the key benefits of ThousandEyes is its ability to provide real-time visibility into your network's performance. You can quickly see how your network is performing, identify issues, and take action to resolve them before they impact your users. With ThousandEyes, you can also set up alerts to notify you of performance issues, allowing you to proactively address them.
Another benefit of ThousandEyes is its ability to help you understand how your network's performance impacts your business. You can see how your network is affecting your customers, track user behavior, and analyze business metrics to identify opportunities for optimization and improvement.
ThousandEyes also integrates with other tools, such as ServiceNow and Slack, allowing you to streamline your workflow and easily track issues and communicate with your team.
Features of Cisco ThousandEyes:
- Network Monitoring
ThousandEyes provides comprehensive network monitoring, including DNS, BGP, and TCP, to identify issues impacting network performance.
- Application Monitoring
ThousandEyes provides real-time monitoring of web applications, including performance and availability metrics, to identify issues before they impact users.
- Endpoint Monitoring
ThousandEyes provides endpoint monitoring to identify issues impacting user experience, such as slow page load times and errors.
- Cloud Monitoring
ThousandEyes provides cloud monitoring to ensure that cloud-based applications and services are performing as expected.
- Network Visualization
ThousandEyes provides network visualization to help network administrators and IT teams understand the performance of networks and identify areas for improvement.
- Internet Insights
ThousandEyes provides internet insights to help organizations understand internet connectivity and identify potential issues impacting performance.
- Network Intelligence
ThousandEyes provides network intelligence to help organizations identify and troubleshoot network issues, such as latency and packet loss.
- Voice and Video Monitoring
ThousandEyes provides voice and video monitoring to ensure that VoIP and video applications are performing as expected.
- Security Monitoring
ThousandEyes provides security monitoring to detect and identify security threats and vulnerabilities.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Cisco's Full-Stack Observability suite is a powerful set of tools and services that can help organizations monitor and manage their IT infrastructure, applications, and services. By providing real-time insights into IT systems, IT teams can quickly identify and resolve issues, reducing downtime and improving the user experience. The FSO suite is flexible and scalable, making it suitable for organizations of all sizes and industries. So, if you're looking for ways to streamline your work and improve your company's operations, consider giving Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes a try.
