How to get correlated, real-time visibility into application and network performance
As a networking guy, I have already seen the network transforms in such a way that we need to understand more of how the applications work to provide the optimal experience for the users. The industry has moved to utilize software-defined networking to deliver dedicated application experiences to individual applications or services. So we need to give our infrastructure the intelligence to understand more of how the applications work. And we have gained a lot of these capabilities in the new Cisco Catalyst 9000 platform of switches and access points. On the WAN side, with Cisco SD-WAN and in the data center with Cisco ACI. Each of these being able to deliver application-based traffic steering and real-time monitoring and analytics. And sharing these across these three different types of infrastructure.
But how can we take gain even deeper insights? Cisco recently acquired ThousandEyes, a cloud-based platform that aims to deliver better digital experiences with unrivaled visibility into the Internet, the cloud, and the networks your application runs on. This gives us multi-layered visibility from app to network to internet. So now that we can make sure our infrastructure is delivering on its promise all the way from the client to the app. Should we stop there?
Applications have also become deeply complex and modern applications are not monolithic services running on a single server anymore. They are highly distributed and scalable microservices that can live on hundreds of different nodes and virtual or physical machines. Each performing individual tasks to make the application behave the way it should. So it’s not enough to know that our clients can reach our application, we need to be able to identify and track their application experience through the lifecycle of the application. And we can do this by relying on Cisco AppDynamics.
AppDynamics is an all-in-one monitoring solution often also called an Application Performance Monitoring tool. It relies on AI and ML to understand how your application works, deep into the code and transaction level, to be able to detect performance issues, errors or even malicious events that could indicate a security breach within the app. And the great about it is that AppDynamics and ThousandEyes tightly integrate to be able to share data and context for end-to-end visibility.
So stitching all this together. What is it really that I am trying to say? It’s that be using these tools in conjunction with each other we will be able to:
- Correlate app- and network-level information to provide a true, end-to-end view
- Quickly identify the root cause of performance issues from the application to the network
- Proactively manage network policies based on application performance metrics
- Bridge functional silos to build a better customer experience
Author: Kent Heide, Technical Solutions Architect, Conscia Norway (NIL is part of Conscia Group)
This blog first appeared here.
Video: Secure End-to-end visibility across your infrastructure
Watch the webinar recording and learn how to deliver end-to-end visibility and observability across your portfolio of services with Cisco AppDynamics and Thousand Eyes platforms.