Cisco’s 7 New Modules Enhance Full-Stack Observability

Cisco has introduced seven new modules on its Observability Platform, which have been collaboratively developed by their partners. These additions aim to enhance the full-stack observability ecosystem, enabling customers to address their specific observability requirements and derive more value from observable telemetry data.

These new modules are designed to address five crucial areas: Business Insights, SAP Visibility, Networking, MLOps & SLO, and Sustainability.

Ronak Desai, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Full-Stack Observability and AppDynamics, stated, “Cisco is dedicated to fostering innovation in observability. With the assistance of our development partners, we are building an observability ecosystem that empowers companies to deliver exceptional digital experiences.”

Will Townsend, Vice President & Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, expressed his admiration for Cisco’s collaborative approach, saying, “It has the potential to provide a diverse set of solutions that can help customers reduce tool sprawl and more proactively manage business operations through partner-led observability practices.”

In today’s digital-centric business landscape, applications play a pivotal role in delivering customer and user experiences. The rapid development and complexity of these applications demand that IT teams, security professionals, and business leaders have real-time visibility into every aspect of application performance and user experience.

However, a recent IDC report highlighted that 60% of IT professionals are concerned that most observability tools are too narrowly focused and fail to provide a comprehensive view of current and trending operating conditions. Additionally, 65% expressed the need for a flexible and customizable observability solution that caters to their specific business use cases.

Cisco’s latest announcement empowers a diverse ecosystem of developers to create and extend solutions that enable organizations to extract value from observable telemetry data. Beyond merely interpreting telemetry data, the Cisco Observability Platform adds context to this data, allowing organizations to gain both insights and the capability to take actionable steps.

The new partner modules are centered around five key themes:

1. Business Insights: These modules correlate telemetry data with business performance across multiple domains, offering customers full visibility and insights into how business operations interact with IT.

2. SAP Visibility: Cisco’s SAP Visibility modules provide comprehensive observability across SAP landscapes and ecosystems, which are often dynamic and complex.

3. Networking: Leveraging Cisco’s networking expertise, these modules correlate essential network telemetry with business metrics and the application stack.

4. MLOps and SLO: Given the growing use of generative AI and modern applications, these modules help customers monitor these applications, their Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and integrate the monitoring of large language models (LLMs) and MLOps models with application observability.

5. Sustainability: These modules assist customers in achieving sustainability goals by providing data on the carbon footprint across various IT domains, helping optimize energy consumption.

Cisco’s partners have already recognized the value of the Cisco Observability Platform and are actively developing modules to meet the observability needs of Cisco’s customer base. Some of these modules include:

– CloudFabrix – SAP Observability: This module enables customers to monitor SAP landscapes, correlating telemetry data to identify the root causes of issues and their impact on business services.

– CloudFabrix – Campus Analytics: This module provides network analytics for campus environments, offering real-time information on network topology, bandwidth consumption, and hotspot visibility as employees return to offices.

– Evolutio – Claims and eCommerce: These modules assist insurance institutions in monitoring claims processes and tracking e-commerce experiences, allowing organizations to quickly identify and address issues.

– DataRobot – MLOps by Evolutio: This module extends observability for predictive AI and generative AI, providing real-time monitoring and diagnostics to improve model performance.

– Nobl9 – Service Level Objectives (SLO): This platform helps organizations define and create SLOs for understanding reliability and offers visualizations for workloads.

– Climatiq – Cloud Carbon Insights: This module adds carbon emission tracking to cloud metrics, enabling environmental analysis and decision-making for sustainable operations.

Several more modules are set to be available in the near future, expanding the capabilities of the Cisco Observability Platform and providing interactive visualizations and insights for infrastructure sustainability, trend analysis, and enhanced model performance monitoring.