Cisco adds AI features to AppDynamics On-Premises

Cisco has added AI features to its AppDynamics observability platform that promise to help customers more quickly detect anomalies, identify performance problems, and resolve issues across the enterprise. The new features will be implemented in a virtual appliance, available this month, for Cisco AppDynamics On-Premises, which gives customers the ability to see and manage their entire application stack, including application code, runtime, infrastructure (servers, databases, networks, VMs, containers), and user experience.

AppDynamics On-Premises includes integration with Cisco’s Secure Application package, which can monitor for application vulnerabilities and threats across services, workloads, pods, containers, and business transactions. This allows for real-time identification and blocking of attacks, according to Cisco.

The new virtual appliance includes an AI-based detection and remediation capability that learns and detects anomalies and can determine root causes in application performance issues, wrote Aaron Schifman, senior technical product marketing manager at Cisco AppDynamics, in a blog about the news. The package combines threat detection, threat intelligence and business impact to create a composite risk score that identifies which threats must be addressed first based on likely business impact, Schifman stated.

AppDynamics On-Premises also works with the recently released Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics, which can help customers spot and update out-of-date software agents as well as on-board and manage new agents through a centralized user interface, Cisco stated.

Agents are key to tracking application status, security and performance monitoring, but as applications become widely distributed via multiclouds, branch offices and private locations, the task of handling agents can become complex and tedious, Cisco stated.

“Customers can now use this virtual appliance together with our Smart Agent capability to deploy new innovations faster and simplify lifecycle operations,” said Ronak Desai, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability, in a statement.

The new on-premises deployment is packaged with all necessary services for deployment in a single VMware vSphere Open Virtual Format (OVA), and support for other virtualization platforms, such as AMI and VHD, is coming soon, Schifman stated.

In other developments, Cisco said 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.”

In addition to the new virtual offering, AppDynamics 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 brings 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 can also build their own customized dashboards with a dashboard generator, Cisco stated. 

“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.