How Cisco full-stack observability can transform your business

Customers expect seamless digital experiences, usually through apps run in a web browser or on mobile devices. Digital transformation is also an experience transformation, and applications are now the business. Poor customer experience often results in poor business outcomes. In response, technology teams are racing to deliver innovative business applications, fast-tracking the adoption of cloud services and cloud-native application architectures. The result is a move to cloud applications, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models, and a disaggregated mixture of technologies backing these apps with a complex, distributed landscape. Technology teams are left with more data and more points of failure than ever before, all while trying to meet the expectations from business leaders to deliver flawless digital experiences. How can businesses gain the visibility they need into their expansive digital infrastructures? Businesses often rely on monitoring tools to track the performance of their applications, but this data only provides a fraction of the visibility required to keep digital businesses running smoothly across their scattered infrastructure. Observability tools take a step beyond traditional monitoring, but only observing a single domain still leaves data siloed, which cannot provide an overall picture of the app experience. You need full visibility into your entire application infrastructure and cross-cloud environments, from the API all the way to the bare metal. Gain visibility, insights, and actions across multiple internal operations and IT teams to ensure digital services are at peak performance and pinpoint where issues arise and who’s responsible for fixing them. With full-stack observability, you can deliver exceptional digital experiences, optimize cost and performance, and maximize your digital business revenue.

What is full-stack observability?

Most developers and administrators are familiar with monitoring or observability tools for their infrastructure. Network monitoring, performance monitoring, and so on are all common parts of modern app development. They aren’t, however, comprehensive tools that can help you better understand how your app functions front to back, from data center to user interaction. Siloed monitoring solutions simply won’t help you understand complex application workflows and use cases in real deployment contexts. Full-stack observability, however, breaks down siloes and provides optimal customer experience, including:

• Performance monitoring and alerts
• Business KPI impact monitoring and alerts
• Domain root cause analysis
• Measurements of cross-domain correlation and dependencies
• Analytics and insights on optimization, compliance, and security

Full-stack observability is not simply a group of observability tools; it gives a holistic view of your entire application stack. With it, you can gain unrivaled insights into the user journey by observing and collecting data of every transaction across every layer of the entire technology stack. With this visibility, IT teams can connect technology performance to business outcomes to optimize for KPIs, keeping you one step ahead of the competition.

Benefits of full-stack observability

Why does your observability need to be “full-stack”? Let’s take a closer look into some of the features and benefits of full-stack observability and how it can improve your business. The detailed view of your entire application stack helps IT teams make sense of data. While some application data can be collected with traditional monitoring and observability tools, these tools do not provide adequate context, leaving technology teams to drown in information. Full-stack observability can help your team gain precise, real-time data regarding which applications are at fault when system performance suffers. Such observability helps developers narrow down exactly where problems have occurred or where system performance has degraded. Your team can spend less time sorting through mountains of data and more time focusing on preventing or fixing problems. Providing context for performance data across your entire technology stack is key to helping technology teams work efficiently and preventing outages that could impact user experience. Full-stack observability provides enhanced alerts and helps upgrade your workflows. With enhanced alerts, your technology team can become aware of issues faster. Armed with more granular data, they will have insight into the changes that have occurred in a system, helping them jump right into problem-solving mode without wasting time deciphering nonspecific error codes. Full-stack observability also provides visibility into the complete history of a request from beginning to end, making it easier for developers to resolve problems in distributed computing environments. This creates improved workflows and eliminates the need to reach out to third-party providers to gather information about app performance or server responsibility. Increased communication paves the way for better collaboration. With more teams gaining full insight into your digital landscape, cross-functional communication is made much easier. Collaboration also benefits from full-stack observability, giving team members and partners a better understanding of how a system’s different elements interact and perform over time. By saying goodbye to siloed solutions, technology teams across the organization can collaborate to solve problems and brainstorm new improvements. How do these abilities improve your business operations and profitability? The rapid problem diagnosis and resolution that full-stack observability provides speeds up software development, offering cost savings to help your bottom line. When developers aren’t preoccupied with a constant stream of maintenance, they can focus more on improving product features. An enhanced global view of their entire system architecture, including third-party applications and services, provides a better understanding of system performance, leading to increased collaboration across the organization and ideating new product design.

How full-stack observability can transform your business

With full-stack observability, you can run your entire application infrastructure with ease. Identify problems quicker than ever before and optimize your applications to run at maximum efficiency to prevent downtime. Gain insights into the performance of your entire app stack and create a stronger, more agile network right at the source. This means you won’t just meet customer expectations; you’ll exceed them. Optimize the user experience by reducing downtime in your application network and increase the reliability and trust in your product. Learn more about your users through tracking the customer journey with real-time visibility. Get detailed reporting on when and how a customer interacts with your brand across every single layer of the digital landscape to inform your business decisions. With full-stack observability on your side, you can act with confidence on what matters most to the business and the user experience. Map the user journey and application data to contextual insights, connecting the dots between the user experience and business outcomes. Have you noticed an uptick in user abandonment, but don’t know where it’s occurring? With full-stack observability, technology teams can identify where users are dropping off to immediately solve for the “why” behind user abandonment. By proactively identifying user frustrations, full-stack observability mitigates the risk to brand reputation and lost revenue. Keep your users satisfied and your reputation intact with detailed, contextualized data. Having one, accessible hub for your organization’s data greatly increases the ease of communication and problem-solving across your teams. Now, everyone can have access to the same pool of information to communicate with each other and identify which issues are affecting end-users and the impact it has on digital business metrics. With full-stack observability, your team can catch problems before they create a ripple effect and enjoy more effective cross-functional collaboration. Optimize your operations by showing teams where issues are occurring, what needs to be done to fix it, and how this can impact business metrics through accessible data. Give your team the tools they need to build an efficient, optimized application with less overhead through full-stack insights.

Does your observability stack up?

The more you see, the more you solve. Cisco full-stack observability is the most robust option on the market, helping you improve customer satisfaction, lower costs by optimizing your team’s effectiveness, streamline troubleshooting, and accelerate innovation and product improvements. Build an efficient, resilient, and agile organization that prioritizes the user experience to continue growing your business. Move beyond monitoring and limited observability, and gain full visibility, insights, and actions with Cisco full-stack observability. Learn More about Full-Stack Observability: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/full-stack-observability.html