January 23, 2019 - AppDynamics, a Cisco company, today unveiled its vision for the Central Nervous System for IT, igniting a new era of AIOps. The Central Nervous System for IT will give businesses full visibility, deep insights, and automated actions across all technology domains that run modern companies: the application, infrastructure, and network.

We live in a time of unprecedented change. Technology’s prevalence in the way we work, live, and learn has resulted in businesses doubling down on making digital experiences better, easier, and more engaging. To build stronger loyalty with customers, businesses are investing in agile models that heavily rely on multi-cloud and IoT environments, distributed services and microservices, APIs, and relentless code releases.

While these technology advancements enable faster innovation, they reduce visibility across technology stacks and increase operational complexity by orders of magnitude. Overwhelmed organizations are looking for relief by leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to sift through volumes of data, derive real-time insights, and orchestrate targeted actions.

Introducing the Central Nervous System for IT

Similar to how the human central nervous system takes input from all the senses and coordinates action throughout our bodies, the Cisco and AppDynamics AIOps strategy is to deliver the Central Nervous System for IT. This Central Nervous System will provide the deepest visibility and unparalleled insights into application environments with the ability to define automated actions that remediate problems and optimize results.

Cisco and AppDynamics are building the Central Nervous System for IT as an extensible, open platform that works with third-party systems to ingest data, correlate and analyze across domains, and automatically remediate problems and optimize experiences. Business results improve by taming the complexity of multi-cloud environments, including distributed applications, infrastructure, and network.

“Today’s application environments are incredibly complex, distributed and dynamic, making it difficult for IT professionals to effectively support business objectives,” said David Wadhwani, CEO, AppDynamics. “Along with Cisco, we’re empowering IT Operations to start their journey into the new era of AIOps with real-time visibility and AI and Machine Learning based insight and automation that ultimately drive improved customer experiences and business performance.”

The first pillar of Cisco’s and AppDynamics’ strategy is to provide visibility across multiple technology domains including applications, infrastructure, and network. For a system of intelligence to work effectively, it needs real-time visibility into everything that drives customer experience.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible for IT professionals to sift through the millions of metrics and events that are continually streaming in. By ingesting data from every domain and using machine learning to correlate and analyze in real time, the Central Nervous System produces insights that save countless troubleshooting hours and shift attention to improving customer experience and business results.

And finally, every second matters, so the Central Nervous System can work with orchestration and automation systems to leverage these insights by taking defined actions that remediate problems and optimize results. Examples include incident response, intelligent workload placement, and cloud cost optimization.

“The continued growth of our business directly correlates with our ability to scale and innovate new technologies, which is why the level of visibility and insight AppDynamics provides us is so useful,” said Mark Settle, CIO at Okta. “AppDynamics and Cisco’s vision for a Central Nervous System for IT is a game changing AIOps solution that will help us to scale and adopt newer technologies that will further improve our identity platform for customers.”

New in Visibility

AppDynamics already provides the deepest application visibility in the market with automated, real-time discovery and mapping of every customer journey in the most complex, distributed, multi-cloud environments. Its coverage area spans popular programing languages, cloud platforms, IoT devices, and enterprise platforms including SAP, mainframes, and the IBM Integration Bus, among others. Today, AppDynamics is building on its industry-leading visibility with two new coverage areas: serverless functions and network visibility.

• Serverless Agent for AWS Lambda - Now enterprises can monitor and manage Lambda functions like any other part of their application estate, including with end-to-end transaction tracing, correlation to relevant customer journeys, and a clear view of impact on customer experience and business metrics.
• Integration with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure - For the first time, application and network teams have a shared view with correlated visibility from application code to underlying network configuration and policies, empowering them to collaborate more easily in delivering flawless performance and great user experiences.

New in Insight

The foundation of AppDynamics - the Business Transaction - is built on machine learning, and today AppDynamics is advancing machine learning again with the release of Cognition Engine. Cognition Engine combines AppDynamics’ industry-leading Business Transaction data model with powerful machine learning insights to deliver application performance diagnostics and automated root-cause analysis that reduce resolution times from minutes to seconds. With Cognition Engine, enterprises have deeper levels of insight to power new competitive advantages in the digital economy.

New in Action

AppDynamics customers can now leverage machine learning-based anomaly detection in Cognition Engine to trigger automated remediation. In fact, AppDynamics’ customers are already leveraging AppDynamics to execute millions of actions every day for everything from executing remediation scripts, opening tickets, sending messages, to triggering actions third-party automation systems. Today, AppDynamics is announcing integrations with leading partners to trigger action for incident response, event correlation, workload optimization, and improved cross-team collaboration.

Comments on the News

“Meeting the demands of our 650,000 customers by delivering a flawless digital experience is our team’s number one priority,” said Dave Wilson, senior director of IT infrastructure and architecture at Paychex. “However, as we adapt new technologies like AI, chatbots, and self-service tools, the complexity of these new technologies makes delivering that seamless experience to our millions of monthly users even more critical. AppDynamics and Cisco’s vision for the future helps provide a deeper level of visibility and insight into our application environments and can also take automated actions to swiftly improve our digital experience for users.”

“IT teams are drowning in data coming from modern application environments that span multiple clouds, containers, and microservices, making it incredibly difficult to find the root cause when there is an issue with an application. At the same time, businesses are under pressure to ensure flawless user experiences every time someone uses their app,” said Nancy Gohring, senior analyst at 451 Research. “AIOps tools – those that can intelligently analyze the breadth of data generated by modern systems – are key to serving the needs of both business and IT constituents in this challenging environment.”

“As one of Cisco’s largest partners, we welcome and support the Central Nervous System vision. It’s highly relevant, differentiating, and addresses our customers business priorities,” said Mike Taylor, CTO at World Wide Technology. “AIOps will help our mutual customers deliver performance and scalable digital experiences to the markets they serve.”

Additional Information

• Learn more about the Central Nervous System for IT
• Learn more about Cognition Engine
• Learn more about Serverless Agent for AWS Lambda
• Learn more about AppDynamics for ACI

About Cisco

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About AppDynamics

AppDynamics is the Application Intelligence company. With AppDynamics, enterprises have real-time insights into application performance, user performance and business performance so they can move faster in an increasingly sophisticated, software-driven world. AppDynamics’ integrated suite of applications is built on its innovative, enterprise-grade App iQ Platform that enables its customers to make faster decisions that enhance customer engagement and improve operational and business performance. AppDynamics is uniquely positioned to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital transformations by actively monitoring, analyzing and optimizing complex application environments at scale.