From Data to Dashboard: Improving Visibility with Full-Stack Observability

Applications have become like oxygen to modern businesses. They enable your company to engage with customers, efficiently complete tasks, improve collaboration, manage data, automate processes, reduce costs and increase productivity. Without applications, a business would struggle to operate.

Because applications are central to operations, application performance is more important than ever. This is where full-stack observability comes into play. A comprehensive full-stack observability solution will provide a holistic view of application performance across all layers of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system — including applications and services that run in the cloud.

Full-stack observability helps teams across organizations view the bigger picture and understand all application dynamics, creating a common language and encouraging knowledge and understanding sharing. It lets us attach a business outcome to the technical metrics impacting it, so we can see what's going on through the many layers of a cloud-based model. This is particularly important in ERP solutions, which operate across multiple databases, applications and repositories.

When we gain the ability to view the entire flow of a transaction — from login to dashboard to product selection to checkout — we can then pinpoint the source of issues down to the code. And see how that specific code impacts business performance. In an ideal scenario, a user can quickly search, sort and analyze large volumes of data to correlate application performance with business strategy.

Seeing applications holistically

Seeing applications end-to-end, with visibility that spans from the business objective to the security features, brings us new levels of clarity. It also delivers the ability for members of disparate teams to make important adjustments in real-time.

For example, say that a marketing team regularly launches campaigns using a given application to drive consumer activity. The team can use data to determine the campaign’s success and any issues that arise. If a typo causes an issue, such as the wrong coupon code, the team can quickly identify the problem and revise the code, adjusting parameters in real time to help increase purchase behavior.

It's just one vital detail in taking a top-down approach that can help ensure business objectives and user experiences are supported across the whole stack — from active technology to infrastructure.

How Cisco AppDynamics leverages a dynamic baseline

Cisco AppDynamics is on a mission to help innovative companies reach their full potential. We are the leader in full-stack observability — including providing full-stack observability and leveraging AI and machine learning to deliver proactive application insights.

Data and insights provide Cisco AppDynamics’ customers with a comprehensive view of operations, so they can make strategic decisions and improve their users’ experiences. Our technology enables our customers to gain visibility, pinpoint the root cause of performance issues and optimize their applications’ performance. When business performance changes, users can trace it back to specific operational or code changes that may have occurred.

By looking at the entire environment — from business expectations to the bits and bytes — our users can begin to uncover unexpected issues. By harnessing insights from accurate and timely data, they can gain deep insight into their operations, enabling them to make more strategic decisions and save on costs.

Full-stack observability helps them monitor and prevent IT incidents, run environments more efficiently through resource provisioning and cost optimization, and respond quickly to threats even in an increasingly complex attack landscape.

Tearing down the silos

Historically, the teams that make up an organization have been siloed. Siloed business units lead to siloed data and siloed applications. So, it’s only natural that the attainment of deep and wide visibility into ERP solutions is a challenging process.

For instance, SAP stores data across multiple systems and databases, which can make it difficult to access specific information in a single view. Integrating and consolidating data from all business units and systems could be a challenge due to the complexity of the interface and managing visibility discrepancies. Additionally, customizing SAP’s architecture to meet an organization’s specific needs and its related processes took time and incurred expenses.

Cisco AppDynamics developed an agent to support the SAP’s proprietary ABAP language and create out-of-the-box dashboards to measure the performance of business transactions and the HANA database, giving visibility into the SAP environment.

We use AI and machine learning to map and baseline business transactions when working with customers. As a result, we can detect deviations quickly and pull business metrics such as daily revenue rates and user experiences. This allows our users to proactively manage application optimization and improve their digital experiences, benefiting both customers and the business.

Improving visibility into ERP can boost productivity, application performance and the ability to collaborate. It provides teams with data on customer experiences and business processes, allowing them to identify issues, collaborate on solutions and automate processes.

Now, the previously siloed teams can use this insight to collaborate and reach their business goals, without requiring large war-room meetings to identify issues. This leads to reduced operational costs, faster responses to customer needs and better compliance — and, ultimately, improves decision-making, efficiency and cost savings.

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