Cisco on Cisco: An enterprise observability story

When goals are met — new opportunities arise

After four years spent building CHAIN, Cisco IT achieved its vision and goals. Cross-functional teams had shared dashboards for transparency, which eased collaboration across incident resolution and access to data that proved service availability through metrics. As Cisco IT leadership turned toward adding more capabilities, new challenges arose. Jeffrey Drury, leader, full-stack observability systems engineering at Cisco explains, “Building this environment was a tremendous effort, and the team delivered on its goals,” he says. “But there were operational challenges and a need to add more infrastructure and applications into the view. However, most of the build team’s time was spent patching, upgrading, securing, and maintaining the new system.”  

Cisco IT recognized that the rate of change in the observability space outpaces the speed at which their internal IT teams can adapt. “Observability is now a set of multidisciplinary capabilities bringing together observability, security for applications and business risk, sustainability, optimization, and AI-driven insights across IT and business boundaries,” says Chuck Churchill, senior director, IT service management at Cisco. “We are in the process of migrating to the Cisco Observability Platform to take advantage of capabilities being rapidly developed by Cisco and its partners to accelerate capabilities that teams and leaders need to make business decisions.”

Impressive time to value

Cisco’s IT leadership looked for ease in adding new capabilities. In CHAIN, features like monitoring, optimization, and security would require a custom build, which takes time and money — but these capabilities already exist within the Cisco Full-Stack Observability portfolio. Extensibility supports the build team’s ability to migrate quickly and begin creating and customizing existing use cases that align with critical KPIs. Within a few weeks, the team provided a proof-of-concept, demonstrating how Application Resource Optimizer enables ops teams to drill down into microservices running on public-cloud Kubernetes® clusters, see a cost reduction over time, and receive recommendations that improve underlying performance for associated data stores, VM storage, and other resources. Similarly, with the Cost Insights module, teams can analyze workloads running in cloud and cloud native infrastructures and leverage cost modeling in public clouds to better understand usage and optimize for cost savings. The addition of customer digital experience monitoring (CDEM) supports correlation between application user experience data from AppDynamics and network insights from ThousandEyes in real time — to remove guesswork that hinders root cause analysis of poor application performance.

Benefits

Cisco Full-Stack Observability starts with AppDynamics

To drive the business forward for customers and partners, Cisco IT leadership needs cross-functional teams to have robust monitoring capabilities for application performance and the corresponding metrics to address incidents in real time. AppDynamics application performance monitoring and its AI/ML capabilities are significant for Cisco IT to gain visibility for application health and quickly identify issues. “With AppDynamics, teams have the necessary telemetry data for AI Ops correlation that gives a holistic view across its entire IT landscape and the capability to bring MELT data into AI Ops,” says Bongoni. “We rely on AppDynamics for overall business performance and individual component views in shared dashboards that our team needs to respond quickly.”

Business context for critical metrics

The Cisco Observability Platform enables aggregated performance metrics across the IT environment, including entities associated with on-premises infrastructure and third-party vendors. “For any business application, we can now see the number of incidents created, any scheduled changes, and drill down into the microservices running on Kubernetes clusters to see violations that have occurred there,” says Bongoni. Pulling data into a single dashboard, accessible by all IT service management roles, gives everyone transparency for critical KPIs such as availability, performance, response time loss, latency, and data coming from various monitoring systems.

With the Cisco Observability Platform, Cisco IT will be able to provide a one-click feature for its command center, replicating an important capability in CHAIN today. When an incident is discovered — ticket creation, opening a situation room in Webex Teams, and sending an e-page to team leads all happen simultaneously. By automating cross-functional processes and creating shared dashboards to promote accountability, system availability for services and applications jumped from just under four 9s to five 9s and business impacting incident hours dropped by 80%.