Cisco Unlocks AI-Powered Intelligence for Self-Hosted Observability

Cisco today announced a new virtual appliance for its AppDynamics On-Premises application observability offering, enabling customers to use a self-hosted observability solution built on AI-powered intelligence for anomaly detection and root cause analysis, application security, and SAP monitoring. The latest innovations allow IT operations teams to detect application performance anomalies faster and with greater accuracy, protect against security vulnerabilities and attacks, and maintain the performance of SAP applications and business processes, all while retaining full control of their observability deployment. Cisco also announced AppDynamics Flex, a new licensing model that provides optionality for customers to choose between self-hosted and SaaS observability offerings and support them through the transition from self-hosted to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) when the time is right for their business.  

While there has been a significant increase in demand for SaaS observability solutions in recent years, for many organizations, self-hosted observability solutions remain in high demand. Self-hosted observability – also referred to as customer-managed observability – includes on-premises deployments or cloud-based deployments where the customer retains control of all the data and associated operations. These needs are typically driven by regulations for data residency and sensitive data protection, and in geographies without a local SaaS point-of-presence. For companies in industries including the public sector, finance, manufacturing, healthcare and retail, the option to have cutting-edge, self-hosted application observability solutions ensures that they can continue to provide end-to-end monitoring of their most critical business systems, in turn, enabling them to deliver market-differentiating digital experiences to their customers and users. 

“Many of our customers continue to rely on self-hosted observability to manage business critical applications, and we are thrilled to deliver these AI-powered innovations as part of Cisco AppDynamics On-Premises for the first time,” said Ronak Desai, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability. “Customers can now use this virtual appliance together with our Smart Agent capability to deploy new innovations faster and simplify lifecycle operations.” 

The new innovations include: 

• AI-Powered Detection and Remediation with Cognition Engine: Improve the accuracy of anomaly detection by leveraging dynamic baseline performance to understand what normal looks like against historical trend data, in turn reducing the mean time to identify (MTTI) for application performance issues. Performance issues can then be resolved faster with root cause analysis and automated transaction diagnostics – analyzing a continuous stream of transaction snapshots that capture events used in proactive performance troubleshooting. This enables IT operations to home in on the problem area and make use of intelligent suggestive issue identification.  
• Application Security: Cisco Secure Application allows customers to locate and highlight application security vulnerabilities with application context, and then leverage an automated business risk score that combines application intelligence and security intelligence, allowing them to prioritize their response by business impact. The addition of Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) enables organizations to defend the business from exploits that target application vulnerabilities. 
• A Resilient SAP Landscape: Customers can ensure service availability and performance with full-stack observability for on-premises SAP and non-SAP environments, surfacing insights to address performance issues before they impact the business. Cisco brings resiliency into the SAP landscape with application performance, augmented by AI-powered intelligence for the Java stack, enabling SAP developers and BASIS admins to ensure service availability, align performance with SAP business outcomes, and discover SAP related security vulnerabilities to mitigate risk. 
• Self-Hosted Offerings in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure: In addition to on-premises deployments, customers can manage their own observability deployments in AWS or Microsoft Azure by using the Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) or Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) images of the virtual appliance. This is valuable when a SaaS instance is not available in the country where a sensitive workload needs to be monitored, or when a customer wants to retain full control of the observability solution.

The Transition to SaaS 

As digital transformation strategies mature and the nature of observable workloads change, some IT teams will find themselves looking to garner operational efficiency by moving some or all of their observed workloads from the purview of a self-hosted observability solution to a SaaS solution. To help customers on this journey, Cisco is introducing AppDynamics Flex Licensing, designed to simplify the transition to AppDynamics SaaS. Cisco AppDynamics Flex Licensing allows organizations to value-shift their chosen on-premises observability investments to the corresponding SaaS offer as their requirements evolve, while reusing the same agent fleet. 

“Many workloads today remain on-premises due to low-latency requirements, high cost, or higher-security requirements of performance-intensive computing workloads, especially for the government and finance sectors,” said Stephen Elliot, Group Vice President for IDC. “Many technology executives are interested in on-premises, self-hosted observability solutions.  Incorporating AI to automatically detect anomalies and suspected root causes in application performance is a huge step forward for on-premises customers who prefer to retain full control of their observability deployment.” 

“As a partner for Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability, SG Solutions is committed to helping our joint customers with observability solutions for their applications wherever their business regulation requires,” said Jindřich Kasal, CEO, SG Solutions. “As many of our customers continue to have requirements for self-hosted observability, we are excited for the new virtual appliance for Cisco AppDynamics On-Premises and the value it brings to our customers in AI-driven intelligence and security.”