Cisco AppDynamics and ThousandEyes are getting an observability boost with open source Open Telemetry.

Observability is critical for network and application operations, though there can be challenges getting full visibility that spans an entire tech stack.

That's that challenge that Cisco is looking to help overcome with a series of updates to its Full Stack Observability (FSO) strategy announced this week, which are designed to help enable Customer Digital Experience Monitoring. The strategy provides an enhanced integration of application observability via Cisco AppDynamics and network intelligence via Cisco ThousandEyes. 

Cisco acquired AppDynamics in 2017 for $3.7 billion, while ThousandEyes came into the portfolio three years later in 2020 via a $1 billion acquisition. The enhanced integration makes use of the open source OpenTelemetry project to provide bi-directional data to both AppDynamics and ThousandEyes to help both AppOps and NetOps teams.

"This enhancement to the Customer Digital Experience Monitoring use-case is automatically embedded to both Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes," Carlos Pereira, Cisco Fellow and chief architect of strategy, applications, emerging technologies and incubation, told SDxCentral. "It will help customers to get a complete picture of their application health, allowing them to make better-informed decisions and resolve issues quicker -- ultimately leading to better user experience and improved business outcomes."

Why OpenTelemetry matters to full stack-observability

The OpenTelemetry project was formed in 2020 as a merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing open source projects. OpenTelemetry is currently a hosted project at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Pereira noted that today Cisco is among the leading contributors to the OpenTelemetry project. In terms of what the technology provides he explained that OpenTelemetry has made it possible to normalize ingestion of telemetry data including metrics, events, logs and traces, in an open and standard way.

In 2022,  Pereira said that Cisco's AppDynamics agents were enhanced to support native OpenTelemetry. Now Cisco is also enhancing the ThousandEyes northbound API to provide network metrics in an OpenTelemetry format.

By focusing on OpenTelemetry, Pereira said that Cisco has been able to expand the scope of its full-stack observability capabilities  to include the end-user monitoring and application dependency mapping too.

How Cisco plans to solve observability challenges

Pereira  said that when digital experience presents an issue – either for B2C or B2B business transactions – organizations want to address it quickly, typically triggering cross operations teams investigation of the root causes.

That includes IT operations teams who struggle with the process of identifying and resolving network and infrastructure performance issues. Pereira said that with Cisco’s enhanced digital experience management integration, they are now able to identify issues faster, improve performance, and minimize the impact on business.

Network operations teams can also often be pulled in to troubleshoot issues.  He noted that network operations people want to be proactive and aligned to the application and business, but typically lack the insight into how network problems may be affecting application health.

"Now network operations teams can have shared visibility into application health to become more aligned with their application counterparts," he said.