Two years after its acquisition by Cisco, AppDynamics continues to expand its vision of surveillance – TechCrunch

Two years ago this week, AppDynamics was preparing to go public. Then Cisco got a big $ 3.7 billion check and the plans changed quickly. Today, as part of Cisco, the company announced that it is broadening its vision of enterprise-wide monitoring by making numerous enhancements to its suite of products.

AppDynamics CEO David Wadhwani said the company wants to monitor your technology wherever it is in the business, from the server to the central server. This type of global vision of a customer's computing environment requires an integrated level of intelligence. Being part of a big company like Cisco has made it possible to progress more quickly towards this approach.

Last year, when Cisco bought out Perspica, a startup of machine learning, the engineering business was integrated with AppDynamics in an effort to make the product smarter. Given the large amount of information, a product like AppDynamics is monitoring it, which is an ideal use case for machine learning, which feeds on abundant amounts of data.

Today, the company has announced the fruit of this work in the form of a new engine of cognition. Instead of just reporting the existence of a problem and leaving it to the DevOps team to determine the root cause, Cognition Engine manages both in an automated way. When you combine this with a rules engine, you can move from detection to root cause badysis to correction much faster than in the past. Finally, Wadhwani expects the Cognition Engine to learn from the rules engine and start creating even more automated fixes.

Analysis of the original cause. Screen: AppDynamics

The company is also announcing new surveillance capabilities, including AWS Lambda, the serverless service, which has been gaining ground among developers in recent years. This approach poses a challenge to a monitoring tool such as AppDynamics because the application is not based on a defined virtual machine, but uses ephemeral resources that are served by AWS at any time, depending on resource requirements. AppDynamics now offers a way to track transactions on this type of infrastructure.

Finally, now that it is part of the Cisco family, the product is not only interested in the application layer, but also extends this vision to integrate the network infrastructure to facilitate understanding of issues and definition of strategies. , as for applications.

All of this is part of what Cisco calls a "central nervous system" for enterprise computing. It's a marketing term designed to encompbad the global vision of trying to locate problems, find the causes, and solve them in the most automated way possible across the entire IT landscape.