In today's digital-first landscape, maintaining the health and performance of your network is critical for the seamless operation of your business and its services. To that end, network observability has emerged as a key concept and discipline in ensuring the robustness and performance of networks. But what is network observability?

Today’s end users have little to no patience for performance issues. Jitters, slow load times, and full-blown outages can quickly lead to brand damage, lost customers, and diminished revenue. That’s why it’s essential for DevOps and engineers to be able to quickly identify and resolve issues before users ever notice them. Doing this requires collecting and analyzing massive amounts of telemetry data – metrics, traces, and logs.

Engineering and ITOps teams have an important mission: keeping their software and digital systems performing and reliable. But as we’re about to embrace a new year full of changes, industry shifts, and AI developments, this mission is challenged by increasingly complex environments, technology alternatives, and an overwhelming number of tools available. The result? Overages, tool sprawl, and toil, which all lead to longer times to detect and resolve issues.

As applications in the cloud become more distributed and complex, the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) for production issues is getting longer. Modern systems are built with hundreds of distinct, ephemeral, and interconnected cloud components, which can make it exceptionally hard for engineers to understand the current state of their applications, what problems are impacting customers, and why those problems are occurring.

In the dynamic landscape of digital business, the pursuit of delivering exceptional user experiences in every digital interaction continues to be a challenge. Cisco, a pioneer in full-stack observability, announced on November 28 at AWS re:Invent the release of business metrics for Cisco Cloud Observability. Let’s delve into the revolutionary landscape that this innovation is carving for both business owners and technical users.

Most SREs and IT Ops manage Java applications without source code access or communication with AppDev teams. When applications have performance issues those SREs or IT Ops teams deploying and maintaining the infrastructure often have to prove that it is the application at fault and supply information to the app supplier which provides evidence of the issue.