Cisco AppDynamics Hybrid Workplace Complexities

The scale of the challenge posed by the implementation cloud native technologies alongside existing on-premises applications and infrastructure, has been revealed in new research from Cisco AppDynamics.

In its new report, ‘The Age of Application Observability‘, Cisco AppDynamics found that 67 percent UK IT pros say business leaders do not understand that modern applications need modern approaches and tools in today’s hybrid IT landscape.

The report was based on a survey of over 1,000 IT professionals, and it found this lack of understanding is adding to the burden of CIOs and IT departments, which are already struggling to manage application availability and performance within hybrid IT environments.

End user experiences

The report found that there is widespread recognition that hybrid environments are here to stay, but technologists point to an urgent need for application observability in order to deliver the seamless digital experiences that customers now demand.

Unfortunately it seems that crippling complexity is impacting the end user experience.

Rapid adoption of cloud native technologies is bringing overwhelming volumes of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) data into the IT department, which traditional monitoring tools just aren’t designed to handle, the report found.

In fact, 78 percent of technologists state that the increased volume of data from hybrid environments is making manual monitoring impossible.

The shift to hybrid environments is also leading to an expansion of attack surfaces and heightened vulnerability to cybersecurity threats.

The report found that most IT departments are still deploying separate tools to monitor on-premises and cloud native applications, and this means they have no clear line of sight of the entire application path across hybrid environments.

For IT departments, it is becoming extremely difficult to troubleshoot issues before they impact end user experience.

And the potential consequences of this are profound – an increased likelihood of disruption and downtime to applications, which in turn can lead to a loss of customers, reputation and revenue.

Talent exodus

And it seems that as a result organisations are risking an IT talent exodus, as the increased complexity caused by hybrid environments is being felt more personally by technologists who find themselves operating under relentless pressure.

Silos are emerging between IT teams and morale is worsening, the report found.

Indeed, 36 percent of technologists claim that silos and ineffective collaboration are already leading to team members leaving their organisation, and 46 percent believe that churn within their IT department will increase if silos persist.

Evidently, IT leaders need to act quickly to avoid a talent exodus within their IT departments, something that no organisation can afford when IT skills are in such high demand.

Need for observability

The report found that observability is vital to optimise application performance and validate cloud investments.

As organisations continue to operate with hybrid environments, they need to move beyond traditional monitoring approaches and implement application observability. Crucially, they need to implement a solution which provides flexibility to span across both cloud native and on-premises environments – with telemetry data from cloud native environments and agent-based entities within on-premises applications being ingested into the same platform.

Technologists believe that this level of unified observability – providing a single source of truth for all IT teams – will bring a wide range of benefits. These include deeper insight to detect and solve the root cause of issues, and the ability to bring together dispersed IT infrastructure and applications.

They also feel that application observability will help to improve productivity in the IT department, forging closer collaboration between teams and uniting all technologists around a shared vision and common goals.

Crucially, given that 81 percent of technologists report heightened scrutiny on cloud investments within their organisation, application observability allows IT leaders to correlate IT performance data with business transactions so they can track the impact of their innovation initiatives in real-time. Organisations can approach innovation in a more controlled and sustainable manner, directing their time and investment where it will have the biggest impact.

Strategic priority

The report therefore found that application observability is now an urgent, strategic priority for organisations.

It found that momentum around application observability is building, with 85 percent of technologists stating that this is now a strategic priority for their organisation, and more than half reporting that their organisation is already exploring solutions.

This is hugely encouraging and reflects a strong desire amongst technologists to finally get to grips with the complexity that has become such a drain on IT teams over the last few years, the report said.

Application observability is now critical for organisations to deliver always-on, seamless digital experiences and to achieve their ambitions for rapid and sustainable innovation. IT leaders must act quickly and decisively to implement the right observability solution for their organisation.

Cisco AppDynamics

Therefore managing application availability and performance in hybrid environments is increasingly needed, and Cisco AppDynamics is well positioned, as it a leading provider of Application Observability and Application Performance Monitoring technology.

AppDynamics helps customers observe what matters inside and beyond their IT environments. Combined with the power of Cisco, AppDynamics enables organisations to deliver exceptional user experiences by centralising and correlating data into contextualised insights of key business metrics – providing them with the power to prioritise actions based on business needs.

To find out more about how Cisco AppDynamics is helping organisations optimising application performance to deliver sustainable innovation click here.