Cisco has integrated AI capabilities into its AppDynamics observability platform, aiming to enable customers to quickly identify anomalies, performance issues and fix problems across their enterprise. These enhancements will be included in a virtual appliance available this month for Cisco AppDynamics On-Premises, enabling customers to oversee and manage their entire application stack, encompassing the application code, runtime, infrastructure and user experience.
The AppDynamics On-Premises features integration with Cisco’s Secure Application package, which can monitor potential vulnerabilities and threats throughout services, workloads, pods, containers, and business transactions. This offers the capacity for real-time identification and blocking of attacks, as stated by Cisco.
The newly included virtual appliance features an AI-driven detection and remediation functionality that learns, detects anomalies and determines the root causes of application performance issues, as explained by Aaron Schifman, the Senior Technical Product marketing Manager at Cisco AppDynamics, in a blog post. This package fuses threat detection, threat intelligence and business impact to generate a composite risk score that prioritizes threats to be tackled based on their prospective business impact.
This on-premises version of AppDynamics also synergizes with the recently introduced Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics. This assists customers in identifying and updating outdated software agents and managing new ones through a unified user interface, as indicated by Cisco.
Tracking application status, security, and performance monitoring are essential roles of agents. However, with the extensive distribution of applications via multiclouds, branch offices, and private locations, managing agents can become intricate and time-consuming, according to Cisco.
Ronak Desai, the senior vice president and general manager of Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability, mentioned in a statement, “Customers can now utilize this virtual appliance along with our Smart Agent capability to expedite the deployment of new innovations and simplify lifecycle operations.”
Schifman stated that the new on-premises deployment is bundled with all the necessary services for deployment as a single VMware vSphere Open Virtual Format (OVA). Support for other virtualization platforms, like AMI and VHD, is on the horizon.
Cisco recently announced that AppDynamics On-Premises can now be hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
“In addition to on-premises deployments, customers can manage their own observability deployments in AWS or Microsoft Azure by using the Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) or Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) images of the virtual appliance,” Schifman stated. “This is valuable when a SaaS instance is not available in the country where a sensitive workload needs to be monitored, or when a customer wants to retain full control of the observability solution.”
Besides the new virtual offering, AppDynamics has added full-stack observability for on-premises SAP and non-SAP environments, which promises to let customer address performance issues within SAP deployments before they impact the business.
“Cisco introduces resiliency into the SAP landscape with application performance, augmented by AI-powered intelligence for the Java stack, enabling SAP developers and BASIS admins to ensure service availability, align performance with SAP business outcomes, and discover SAP related security vulnerabilities to mitigate risk,” Schifman stated.
The AppDynamics platform can now correlate metrics across SAP and non-SAP environments as well as monitor SAP systems and processes with over 30 pre-built dashboards. Customers also have the option to build their own customized dashboards with a dashboard generator, according to Cisco.
“Correlate real-time visibility of ABAP, SAP’s proprietary language, down to the code level, with the broader landscape stack to understand how performance impacts the business and revenue streams,” Cisco stated.
Cisco and SAP have had a long-standing strategic partnership offering all manner of collaboration to support and manage hybrid cloud environments.
