A quality digital experience is a harbinger of business success, leaving little room for performance glitches or system failures. Given the complexity of the modern IT ecosystem and tool sprawl for IT professionals, full-stack observability (FSO) has become a requisite to help IT organizations problem-solve and ensure secure, stable, and superior digital experiences.
According to a Cisco survey, three-quarters of technologists face more IT complexity than in past years, with overwhelming data noise limiting their ability to draw insights. Despite these challenges, elevating application experience takes precedence — in the survey, 84% of the participating companies indicated that the need to maintain the performance of business applications is now more important than ever.
FSO brings together data from across application domains, making it available to IT practitioners for gathering insights designed to optimize application experiences. Critical observability and application performance tools are often scattered across hybrid, multicloud environments, adding to already spiraling complexity and limiting IT organizations’ ability to garner insights and initiate real-time action.
What’s required for effective FSO?
To orchestrate FSO so it delivers full visibility, real-time insights, and recommended actions, IT organizations should consider a platform that addresses the following functional areas:
Observation. As opposed to monitoring individual domains, FSO delivers full-stack visibility and insights across application infrastructure, networks, infrastructure, security, storage, and web services. The right FSO platform should create a holistic picture of IT infrastructure by giving insights into hybrid applications, cloud-native applications, customer digital experiences, and application dependencies. FSO solutions can assist with identifying and remediating problems and threats. When tied to the business context, FSO can help operations teams deliver exceptional digital experiences while also creating more time to focus on strategic innovation.
Security. FSO enables security and applications teams to expand their visibility and prioritize issues based on business risk observability. With a complete security picture, operations teams can correlate security issues with application performance and use granular details to pinpoint problem areas. Combining security findings with business context ensures that rapid risk assessment and response are channeled where it matters most.
Optimization. FSO delivers a comprehensive view of costs across the hybrid, multicloud IT landscape to reduce expenses while increasing the utilization of assets. The ability to garner insights into how resources are being allocated across workloads eliminates guesswork, ensuring optimized reliability and availability, and enables organizations with capacity planning for their application infrastructure.
Extensibility. Business needs are continuously changing, so reliance on a single product or set of capabilities can be limiting. An FSO platform should be open and extensible, so an entire app ecosystem can be visible and managed from one place. A fully extensible entity-based data model will ensure full visibility and the ability to add modules as requirements shift.
AIOps support. Using AIOps as part of a broad FSO solution stack can significantly decrease complexity and deliver higher service and application availability. AIOps can facilitate the design of persona-based visualization frameworks that reduce noise and help teams solve issues faster with automation.
The bottom line
Customers expect no less than flawless application performance. With FSO, operations teams can cut through complexity to deliver the always-on, secure experiences that set digital business leaders apart from their competitors.
To learn more about Cisco’s FSO solutions, click here.
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