Digital transformation is about more than just generating new customer interactions – it also entails having the right applications in place to deliver a differentiating customer experience that meets or exceeds expectation.
But, today’s application environments continue to grow in complexity as more and more customers consume multiple cloud platforms. Compounding the complexity is the sheer volume of data produced by application infrastructure, and the high potential for performance problems each time an update or change is made to the existing infrastructure. While traditional application monitoring provides real-time alerts for performance problems, there’s evidence that IT teams need more support to effectively monitor the increasingly complex landscape.
This is where today’s AIOps technologies can provide value. Short for “artificial intelligence for IT operations,” AIOps solutions – such as Cisco’s AppDynamics offering – can help businesses monitor and manage their hybrid cloud environments on their path to digital transformation.
Many organizations embrace a hybrid cloud approach to match business needs with IT resources while providing application developers with an agile, on-demand and self-service access to those services. Hybrid clouds provide the best of both worlds, allowing organizations to consume services built in the private cloud along with modernized public cloud offerings to deliver transformational business outcomes.
But while a hybrid cloud can deliver tremendous advantages, it also introduces challenges of its own: for one thing, multiple host locations and varied infrastructures are complex to manage, so it’s difficult to monitor how well applications are performing. Each cloud has its own networking, security, tools, policies, and APIs, making it difficult to understand the end-to-end application and the underpinning services that enable it. In addition, each service can impact delivery of the business system, potentially affecting the customer experience. Consequently, when application performance problems go unresolved, they can be potentially disastrous to your business and your brand.
To effectively monitor an increasingly complex landscape, IT teams need a consistent view across hybrid cloud and the entire IT lifecycle of their services.
AIOps platforms employ big data, modern machine learning, and other advanced analytics technologies to proactively and intelligently improve a range of IT functions, including monitoring, automation and service desk. AIOps platforms also play a critical role in eliminating the manual component of identifying issues within the IT landscape, a problem that’s compounded by the still-siloed nature of the monitoring environment.
In fact, recent research from AppDynamics revealed that 91% of global IT leaders said monitoring tools only provide data about how releases impact their own area of responsibility, and not the broader IT environment, or the business. With an AIOps platform, IT doesn’t have to work harder to get smarter about what’s happening within every facet of application infrastructure.
One such AIOps platform offered by Presidio is Cisco’s AppDynamics (AppD) solution for application performance management. AppD provides a unified management strategy, allowing IT staff to use the same set of tools and processes for hybrid cloud resources to support business, IT and DevOps goals, promoting business transformation based on Intel® architecture.
The AppD solution has relevance at every level of an organization:
From edge devices to servers, AppD provides detailed records of application performance and response times. Previously IT teams looked at server performance to identify problems, whereas now the focus is on the end-user experience. With the capabilities of the AppDynamics solution, organizations can increase application availability to reduce incidents and accelerate issue resolution. They can reduce costs related to monitoring and outages while maximizing hardware resources. And, they can proactively detect and resolve production issues, promoting quality.
Presidio is the region’s premier provider of digital transformation solutions built on secure digital infrastructures deployed in a hybrid-cloud environment. We deploy modernized servers featuring Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors paired with a new class of memory and storage, Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory, and Intel® Ethernet network adapters.
Whether AppDynamics, Splunk or another AIOps solution, Presidio will provide a top-down approach to managing business systems and promoting customer success in a single tool. To get the most value from AIOps with the least complexity, it all comes down to choosing an experienced, capable provider to deploy a high-performance, Intel-based hardware stack running premium software tools for digital transformation.