FSO Platform: see everything, correlate everything

The Cisco Full Stack Observability Platform

Cisco has been the first vendor to offer a end-to-end observability solution, based on complementary products that are integrated into each other. The use cases described in my previous post are served by a combination of AppDynamics and ThousandEyes, with information fed by first class security system as Talos, Kenna and Panoptica (more in next posts).

Even if another vendor had such an extensive coverage (and they have not), they would not be integrated out of the box. The native integration enhances the power of each product (Applications Ops see also the network, Network Ops see also the applications, Security Ops see everything, everybody get the business context) and saves a lot of time and effort that a custom integration would require. 

But we think this is not enough.

Some companies are already very advanced in their journey to Observability. They have already adopted advanced solutions from APM vendors (including Cisco and competitors), network monitoring and cloud services monitoring. Some have built sophisticated home grown systems for Observability and AIOps. 

They might find that the predefined view of the world that is implemented in traditional APM solutions is not enough. Entities like an Application, a Service, a Business Transaction and their relationship might not be sufficient to describe their business domain, or a technical domain that is more complicated than common architectures. They would like to extend the domain model, but they can't because the solution has not been designed for extensibility.

Extensibility of the Observability solution

What they are looking for is the possibility to extend their visibility, and the possibility to correlate collected information to describe what's relevant for them.

Here comes the Cisco FSO Platform. 

The Cisco FSO Platform is an open, extensible, API driven platform that empowers a new observability ecosystem for organizations. It is a unified platform built on OpenTelemetry (an open source project by CNCF) and anchored on metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT), enabling extensibility from queries to data models with a composable UI framework.   

Cisco FSO Platform is a developer friendly environment to build your own view of the world.

You can tailor the Full Stack Observability to your business domain, or to your technical domain, defining the entities that are relevant for your stakeholders and the relationships that tie them. From business processes to every asset included in your architecture: applications, infrastructure, cloud, network, IoT and business data sources.

Creating a series of connections that you can navigate to fully control what's going on, as you do on Linkedin exploring a people's network and the information they generate (see next post for an example). All based on telemetry that you can collect from virtually everything: Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces. A new open standard, OpenTelemetry (supported by vendors and by the open source community), defines the way data are collected and ingested. These data feed the domain model, and you can later use them to investigate about the root cause of any issue, or to report about the business health state, or to look for opportunities to improve the efficiency.

The Cisco FSO platform is a differentiated solution that brings data together from multiple domains such as application, networking, infrastructure, security, cloud and business sources. Users can get correlated insights that reduce time to resolve issues and optimize experiences; while Partners, ISVs, and software developers can now build meaningful FSO applications enabling new use cases.  

So there are alternative solutions for Full Stack Observability?

In their evolution from traditional monitoring, organizations go through some maturity steps. It's not a revolution in one day.

Someone starts replacing individual tools with more complete solutions that unify the visualization of collected metrics from different technical domains. Others start correlating those data with business metrics and KPI. Then they extend the observability to - really - the full stack.

For all those, the solution that I started describing in my previous post provides an excellent value. The seven use cases I've mentioned are completely supported by the Cisco FSO solution based on the integration of Appdynamics, ThousandEyes and the security ecosystem. It's well integrated and offers the various operations teams access to deep visibility as well as shared business context.

Some organizations are already in a more advanced state. They have already realized the Full Stack Observability, either adopting the Cisco solution or a competing one, or growing a AIOps system in house. But they feel that they need more, because their business domain (or parts of their technical domain) is not completely covered by the solution they have.

Thanks to the Cisco FSO Platform, that is extensible and developers friendly, they can build the needed extension themselves (or can have a look at the Cisco FSO App Exchange).  This powerful engine, that backs all the Cisco FSO products, will allow those organizations to ingest telemetry from virtually every asset and to show correlated data based on their desired view of the world.

So finally we have two parallel motions, that don't conflict necessarily. The adoption of one or the other depends on your current observability maturity level and specific need for tailored dashboards.

In next post I will show a parallelism between the navigation across your LinkedIn network of contacts and the navigation through connected entities in the FSO Platform to search for the root cause of an issue by exploring Metrics, Events, Logs and traces associated to each entity.

Subsequently, I will describe fundamental use cases like Business Risk Observability.