Cisco, AppDynamics Integrate Monitoring Tools To Unite App, Infrastructure Teams

Cisco and AppDynamics are introducing new application mapping technology and are more tightly integrating their technologies to put both application and infrastructure teams on the same page.

Cisco Systems and its application performance monitoring software arm, AppDynamics, are now fastening their technology even more tightly together.

AppDynamics unveiled its new Experience Journey Map feature for app developers, which is being integrated with Cisco’s Intersight Workload Optimizer for infrastructure teams, the two firms revealed at Cisco Live EMEA 2020 in Barcelona on Tuesday.

The AppDynamics Experience Journey Map is a new view that gives users -- or channel partners supporting end customers -- visibility into the path of an application using data science algorithms that can pull out information in real-time. The map shows user flows overlaid with performance and business metrics, which lets application developers and specialists identify application bottlenecks or problems. It can also point out infrastructure challenges with more performance and user experience context, Cisco said.

[Related: Cisco's AppDynamics Launches Integration Partner Program To Deepen Visibility For IT Teams]

"In addition to performance, we really want to discover critical moments in the customer experience when they interact with an app," said Kaustubh Das, vice president of product management for Cisco. "That insight helps us maximize business benefits."

For infrastructure teams, Cisco's Intersight Workload Optimizer ensures efficient performance and resourcing of critical applications by giving IT visibility into all infrastructure, including software and hardware, that could be impacting application performance. The tool can also correlate user experience to underlying infrastructure in real-time, according to Cisco.

Many approaches to application performance monitoring are siloed, with organizations paying attention to infrastructure and application monitoring separately. App teams monitoring performance often have no view into the underlying infrastructure and how it could be changed to better support applications. On the other hand, only having visibility into the infrastructure layer doesn't show IT teams what is happening with applications in real-time so problems often have to be fixed after performance has already been impacted, said Whitney Satin, director of product marketing for AppDynamics.

Together, the AppDynamics Experience Journey Map integrated with the Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer removes the need for IT teams to stitch together separate monitoring tools, Satin said.

Too often, separate teams are looking for issues, which can lead to finger-pointing. The integration between AppDynamics and Cisco's monitoring tools gives everyone the same lens, said Brent Collins, senior director, data center solutions for St. Louis-based solution provider giant World Wide Technology, a Cisco and AppDynamics partner.

"Cisco is really tying it together so it's easier for people to look holistically at issues," Collins said. "Having these tools pre-integrated is going to make it a whole lot easier for partners like us, and for our customers that want to do advanced troubleshooting on applications."

Cisco also took to the event to introduce The Hyperflex application platform, a development environment for containerized applications for developers building applications on containerized platforms, such as Kubernetes. "We wanted to take it one level up and create a turnkey, ready-to-use, enterprise-grade [offering] for developing those kinds of applications," Cisco's Das said. The platform will give developers a simple place to start, without the "intimidation" of open-source environments, he added.

AppDynamics had a busy year with the channel. The company in June launched its Integration Partner Program, a curated ecosystem of technology companies that integrate with AppDynamics' application visibility tools.

AppDynamics told CRN in October that it dramatically increased its channel business as partners build businesses around APM and AIOps. The company, now owned by Cisco, has about 70 percent of business being transacted through the partner ecosystem; a 60 percent increase in deal registrations from partners over the course of one year and 154 percent year-over-year growth in partner-sourced business.