Cisco, AWS strengthen ties between cloud-management products

Cisco and Amazon Web Services have deepened their technology partnership with new capabilities that are aimed at helping enterprise customers improve the visibility and management of cloud-based resources.

The companies have integrated Cisco ThousandEyes network intelligence platform with the Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor service to help customers better locate and monitor their AWS-powered applications. In addition, the vendors have more closely tied Cisco’s Observability Platform with AWS-based business metrics to correlate cloud services with application and business performance.

Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor gives customers access to Internet health events and Internet performance insights that could impact cloud workload performance and behavior, while ThousandEyes integration brings end-to-end cloud and Internet visibility, wrote Prabhnit Singh, director of product for ThousandEyes, in a blog post about the integration which was unveiled at the AWS re:Invent event this week. 

Combining the two packages will give customers a complete view of an application’s entire service delivery path, across private environments, the public Internet, and into the AWS network, Singh wrote. The ThousandEyes technology can also warn when a user’s experience is less than ideal and can pinpoint failures.

In addition, CloudWatch Internet Monitor lets customers quickly spot performance issues and pinpoint locations and providers that are affected. The service then helps customers take action to improve end users’ network experience, AWS stated. “Customers can see a global view of traffic patterns and health events, and easily drill down into information about events at different geographic granularities. If an issue is caused by the AWS network, customers receive an AWS Health Dashboard notification that tells them the steps that AWS is taking to mitigate the problem,” the company stated.

“The integration of Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor insights into the ThousandEyes platform will enable us to provide AWS customers with precise suggestions on where to place their workloads to achieve optimal (lowest) time-to-first-byte performance,” Singh wrote. It will also let customers simplify their ThousandEyes setup by monitoring coverage based on user traffic profiles then suggesting optimal vantage points (based on geographic and/or network proximity) to locate resources, Singh stated.

Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor integration will be available in Cisco ThousandEyes in spring 2024. The ThousandEyes platform is available in the AWS Marketplace.

On the observability side, the vendors said they brought together a variety of new AWS cloud business metrics for the Cisco Cloud Observability module to help customers better prioritize technology and business issues based on their potential impact on revenue, order conversions or other important customer concerns.

The Cloud Observability application is part of Cisco’s Full-Stack Observably Platform, which is designed to collect and correlate data from application, networking, infrastructure, security, and cloud domains to provide a clear view of what’s going on across the enterprise and make it easier for enterprises to spot anomalies, preempt and address performance problems, and improve threat mitigation.

The AWS integration provides customers an easy way to identify business transactions configured with business metrics for troubleshooting.  Customers can, for example, preview business transaction attributes for accuracy and set up mission-critical metric alerts in case of problems.   The metrics offer ways to measure baseline performance and provide a historical analysis trend line to make it easy to identify when business performance is abnormal.  

Cisco also announced support for 10 additional AWS services that are now pre-integrated with the Cisco Cloud Observability app.

Cisco and AWS have developed a wide variety of integrated technologies over the past few years to help enterprise customers deploy and manage cloud-based resources. For example, Cisco’s SD-WAN technology integrates with AWS Direct Connect, a service that enables private connections between on-premises networks and AWS VPCs. The service lets customers link on-premises networks to their AWS deployments.

Another integration enables Cisco’s DNA Spaces package to work with AWS IoT Core, a managed cloud service for device access, to provide intelligent edge networking for IoT applications. The idea is to allow secure, cloud-based IoT device connectivity and monitoring.