Unraveling Endpoint Complexity:
A Developer’s Guide
Transform data into developer-friendly solutions
A Developer’s Guide
Your IT environment
is complicated.
is complicated.
Today’s systems bring new challenges in application oversight and management.
With a wide array of components and endpoints, visibility is a great start to keeping tabs on it
all, but it’s not enough. To make your systems sing for your business, you need cross-domain
context and insights to inform better, faster decision-making and collabortion across teams.
It’s time to move beyond application monitoring and tool sprawl.
It’s time to move beyond application monitoring and tool sprawl.
of organizations anticipate negative consequences for their business from lack of
insights and visibility
1
"Agents of Transformation 2021:
The Rise of Full-Stack Observability Report." AppDynamics.
The old ways of
understanding systems
won’t cut it
understanding systems
won’t cut it
Traditional monitoring solutions offer tools tailored for specific functions.
Network tools watch networks, application tools track applications.
These tools use bespoke instrumentation to produce data that trip alerts when pre-defined service conditions arise.
Using these tools, teams tend to reactively mind their own domains, responding to mostly predictable system issues.
But the silos, provincial problem-solving, and tool sprawl that emerged have hindered the holistic oversight required for marshalling today’s complex systems.
These tools use bespoke instrumentation to produce data that trip alerts when pre-defined service conditions arise.
Using these tools, teams tend to reactively mind their own domains, responding to mostly predictable system issues.
But the silos, provincial problem-solving, and tool sprawl that emerged have hindered the holistic oversight required for marshalling today’s complex systems.
of respondents to a recent IDC survey said their organizations use more than 10
monitoring/observability tools
2
"An Executive
Blueprint for an Observability Platform: Driving Operational Excellence and Business
Outcomes through Analytics and Automation." IDC.
The virtue of
seeing through silos
seeing through silos
That’s because modern approaches to system
design like cloud computing, microservices, containerization, and virtualization have atomized and
abstracted IT endpoints. Running applications and infrastructure involves far more dependencies,
components, and endpoints.
When an application falters, the root cause may lie in some far away server in a data center owned by someone else. Or it might be buried somewhere in the source code in a service accessed via API. The key to optimizing system operations is understanding these dependencies and navigating complexity in context.
When an application falters, the root cause may lie in some far away server in a data center owned by someone else. Or it might be buried somewhere in the source code in a service accessed via API. The key to optimizing system operations is understanding these dependencies and navigating complexity in context.
Number of dependencies a typical cloud-native app has on other services,
resources, or APIs
3
"Full Stack Observability:
Expanding the Digital Experience and Impact with Advanced Business Context." IDC,
commissioned by Cisco.
There is a big difference
between traditional
monitoring and observability.
between traditional
monitoring and observability.
With an observability solution that collects and correlates data from
endpoints and components throughout your environment, you’ll transform how your organization
applies system information. In other words, this data can help you answer abstract questions that
measure an impact on end-user experience and may not be predefined.
Monitoring
Reactive
Static & Pre-defined
Answers ‘When’ & ‘What’
IT-centric
Siloed
WYSIWYG
Static & Pre-defined
Answers ‘When’ & ‘What’
IT-centric
Siloed
WYSIWYG
Observability
Proactive
Dynamic
Answers ‘Why’
Customer-centric
Cross-domain
Contextual
Dynamic
Answers ‘Why’
Customer-centric
Cross-domain
Contextual
It‘s hard to imagine a future with fewer endpoints and fewer components
to manage. It‘s not so hard to imagine that more tools, more silos, and more small-scope
thinking will prevent companies from doing what‘s best for their customers and themselves in
the digital realm.
Organizations are, in fact, evolving with the complexity to embrace observability and simplify their tool sets.
Organizations are, in fact, evolving with the complexity to embrace observability and simplify their tool sets.
30%
of organizations with distributed architectures will have adopted
observability techniques by 2024, up from 10% in 2020
4
"Innovation Insight for Observability." Gartner.
81%
of organizations are focused on migrating from legacy/reactive application and
infrastructure performance monitoring (AIPM) tools to modern/proactive observability tools
5
451 Research, part of S&P Global Market
Intelligence.
Get started with Cisco
Observability Solutions today.
Observability Solutions today.