Cisco extends observability platform with formal launch at Cisco Live 2023

By Michael Cooney

Senior Editor, Network World |

Too many management tools that don't integrate well and a lack of visibility into third-party systems are among the problems enterprise IT teams face when they try to manage multivendor, distributed environments.

Cisco's Full-Stack Observably Platform is designed to collect and correlate data from application, networking, infrastructure, security, and cloud domains to provide a clear view of what's going on across the enterprise and make it easier for enterprises to spot anomalies, preempt and address performance problems, and improve threat mitigation.

While Cisco has been talking about FSO functionality for a year, it officially announced the platform at its Cisco Live event this week.

Liz Centoni, executive vice president, chief strategy officer, and general manager for applications at Cisco, cited data from IDC on the management challenges that enterprises face. "[IDC] found that, on average, an organization uses anywhere from 10 to 100 different monitoring and observability tools. So, tool sprawl is real. And it creates this challenge in collecting, managing and sharing this data," Centoni said.

Enterprises have siloed teams and siloed processes, which results in higher total cost of ownership and operational inefficiency, Centoni said.

"Observability can become that primary way to reduce this friction between teams, unify the data, unify those actions, unify the practices to enable that flawless digital experience," she said. "FSO is anchored on metrics, events, logs and traces. [It provides] businesses the ability to do ingestion in real time, from any data source, that lets customers consolidate to fewer tools, collect data from any source, correlate information, and give them AI-driven analysis to predict and prevent problems."

Cisco's FSO platform supports OpenTelemetry, which is a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs used to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data to analyze software performance and behavior. OpenTelemetry is being developed under the Cloud Native Foundation by contributors from AWS, Azure, Cisco, F5, Google Cloud, and VMware, among others.

The FSO rollout at Cisco Live introduced the platform's first modules, including:

Cisco's FSO platform also integrates with multiple third-party systems. Here are some of the first integrations:

Also under the FSO umbrella is Cisco's recently announced Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) platform, which more closely ties together the vendor's AppDynamics application observability capabilities and ThousandEyes network intelligence. The goal with DEM is to get business, infrastructure, networking, security operations, and DevSecOps teams working together more effectively to find the root cause of a problem and quickly address the issue, according to Cisco.

Observability tools and applications are of growing interest to enterprises. Gartner says that by 2024, 30% of enterprises implementing distributed system architectures will have adopted observability techniques to improve digital-business service performance, up from less than 10% in 2020.

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Michael Cooney is a Senior Editor with Network World who has written about the IT world for more than 25 years. He can be reached at [email protected].

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