It was just a few years ago that “digital transformation” became the buzzword, majorly impacting every industry. Although it started prior to the pandemic, we all watched as the journey was accelerated by necessity starting in March 2020. Today, digital transformation has moved beyond just upgrading technology to become a transformation of the customer experience as well. What it comes down to is that experience creates value. The experience must be good for everyone, from the customers to the employees, investors, developers, and partners, according to Bradley Mitchell, AppDynamics Channel Account Manager for Cisco. With AppDynamics and ThousandEyes, distributors can help customers achieve full-stack observability and optimize their experiences.
Full-Stack Observability
In a world where experience is everything, a bad experience can be detrimental to a business. People today expect everything to be immediate. “Applications are now the business in every type of business,” Mitchell explained. They are used for everything from quickly ordering products and food to helping accomplish tasks at work. When applications fail, business is affected. Despite many people’s belief that apps are simple, modern apps are actually multi-Cloud, requiring information from various parts of the Cloud. Mitchell stated how this can create a very chaotic ecosystem where all the data needs to come together to create a rich experience. Application experiences are cumulative, based on the application, network, infrastructure, security, storage, and web service. So, how does one address this? What can businesses do to manage their apps and data so that everyone – from customers to employees – has the best experience possible? The answer distributors can provide customers with is Cisco’s full-stack observability solutions.
As the market evolves toward observability, Cisco has focused on its own full-stack observability offerings. “Cisco is not trying to help you understand just the data; we want to translate it, interpret it with our customers so they know their business contacts and customers’ experiences,” Mitchell explained. Full-stack observability from Cisco focuses on full-stack visibility, full-stack insights, and full-stack actions. Full-stack visibility is an observable and optimizable technology stack, allowing customers not only to see the data but also to optimize and understand it within in the big, complex environment. Described as the “secret sauce”, the insights present data about resolved issues, showing the amount saved and the number of customers supported. Finally, actions prioritize remediations and optimizations across the stack.
ThousandEyes
Today’s new reality, according to Bob Porter, Cisco Global Channel Architect, Cloud, is the new data center, SaaS is the new application stack, work from home is the new office, and Internet is the new network. Although the growing popularity of and reliance on Cloud and Internet has brought innumerable positive effects, it has also introduced more unknowns. When you move outside the traditional enterprise boundary, you are blind, so how can you navigate what you cannot see? This is where ThousandEyes comes in to assist customers with full-stack observability. ThousandEyes provides visibility into the digital experience, whether via your enterprise, the Internet, Cloud, or SaaS without boundaries. It can pinpoint issues in real-time, dramatically reducing MTTR, reducing business impact of network and application anomalies. It also gathers network and application data, correlates it, and presents it in a cohesive view of the end-to-end digital experience. These functions help ThousandEyes make sense to many customers, and therefore, and easy sell for partners. Mitchell described it currently as “selling like hotcakes”, making it worthwhile for partners to learn more about it and begin selling it.
AppDynamics
While ThousandEyes is simply SaaS, AppDynamics can be either on-prem or SaaS. AppD, as it’s often referred to, connects everything in the infrastructure to the impact it has on the applications and customers, giving customers application and business awareness across the stack. It allows users to pinpoint the root cause of app problems in real-time—from third party APIs to code level issues—so IT teams can quickly make a fix. AppDynamics is currently working to evolve its portfolio. Due to the growing need for Cloud-native software and applications, AppD had to respond accordingly. Because of this, Mitchell shared the release of a new observability product, AppDynamics Cloud, built from the ground up for full-stack observability. He explained how it uses telemetry and melt data to enable users to see the Cloud native outputs, all put together on a single dashboard.
Conclusion
Experience is essential to business today. Customers expect a quick, pleasant, and productive experience, while employees expect to be able to provide that experience using tools that work and accessible resources. People rely on apps and processes that run smoothly for a positive experience. Partners can help their customers optimize experiences through full-stack observability solutions, like ThousandEyes and AppDynamics. These tools provide businesses with the visibility, insights, and actions needed for the best experiences possible.
Learn more by watching the full webinar here.
