Go To Market Executive Summary – Full Stack Observability
Mark Lynd
August 31, 2023
Go To Market Executive Summary – Full Stack Observability
Executive Summary
Full Stack Observability (“FSO”) technology is an innovative and powerful approach that is growing in popularity and enables businesses to monitor and analyze their entire technology stack, from infrastructure to applications. This technology provides real-time insights into system performance, allowing businesses to quickly identify and resolve issues, improve user experiences, and optimize their operations. Full-stack observability technology typically includes monitoring, logging, tracing, and analytics tools, which work together to provide real-time insights into system performance. By using Full Stack Observability technology, businesses can better understand their systems and make data-driven decisions to improve their operations.
Market Analysis
The market for Full Stack Observability technology is growing rapidly as businesses increasingly rely on complex technology stacks to deliver their products and services. This market's key manufacturers include New Relic, Datadog, Splunk, and Dynatrace. These companies offer a range of Full Stack Observability solutions, including infrastructure monitoring, application performance management, log analytics and more.
Competitive Landscape
The competitive landscape for Full Stack Observability technology is intense, with several established players and new entrants vying for market share. Key differentiators in this market include the breadth and depth of monitoring capabilities, ease of use, integration with other tools, and pricing.
Here is a revised list of ten manufacturers and their full-stack observability products, along with two key differentiators for each product:
Cisco Full-Stack Observability (Cisco FSO): This product combines data from across the tech stack and business to provide insights and deliver optimal application experiences. Key differentiators include the ability to prioritize issues affecting users, revenue, business risks, and costs, as well as minimizing tool sprawl to make problem-solving faster and simpler.
AppDynamics: Owned by Cisco, AppDynamics offers an observability platform that provides real-time visibility into application performance, user experience, and business outcomes. Key differentiators include end-to-end transaction tracing and the ability to correlate application performance with business metrics.
New Relic: New Relic’s observability platform provides real-time insights into the performance of applications, infrastructure, and digital customer experiences. Key differentiators include a unified data platform for all events (including metrics, logs, and traces) and powerful full-stack analysis tools in one connected experience as part of the DevOps workflow.
Datadog: Datadog’s observability platform provides monitoring and analytics for cloud-scale applications. Key differentiators include monitoring the entire stack (including infrastructure, applications, logs, and more) in one place and customizable dashboards and alerts.
Dynatrace: Dynatrace’s observability platform provides AI-powered monitoring and analytics for cloud-native environments. Key differentiators include automatic discovery and monitoring of all components in the technology stack and AI-powered root cause analysis.
Microsoft: As a cloud provider, Microsoft offers a range of tools to monitor the cloud that can lead to an observability platform. Key differentiators include integration with Azure services and the ability to monitor both cloud and on-premises environments.
Amazon Web Services (AWS): As a cloud provider, AWS offers a range of tools to monitor the cloud that can lead to an observability platform. Key differentiators include integration with AWS services and the ability to monitor both cloud and on-premises environments.
Splunk: Splunk’s observability platform provides real-time monitoring and analytics for cloud-native environments. Key differentiators include the ability to ingest and analyze large amounts of data in real-time and customizable dashboards and alerts.
Micro Focus: Micro Focus offers an observability platform that provides monitoring and analytics for hybrid IT environments. Key differentiators include support for a wide range of technologies (including cloud, containers, and mainframes) and customizable dashboards and alerts.
IBM: IBM’s observability platform provides monitoring and analytics for hybrid cloud environments. Key differentiators include integration with IBM Cloud services and support for various technologies (including cloud, containers, and mainframes).
Brief on Cisco’s FSO Offerings
A customer can use Cisco FSO and AppDynamics each separately or combined to have a more complete observability capability by leveraging the strengths of both solutions. Cisco FSO provides full-stack visibility, insights, and actions by transforming siloed data into actionable insights that provide shared context to IT teams. AppDynamics provides real-time visibility into application performance across complex distributed environments.
How do they achieve all of the visibility? Both Cisco FSO and AppDynamics use MELT telemetry, which stands for Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces. These are the four essential data types or “pillars” of Observability. The Cisco FSO Platform leverages OpenTelemetry™ collections to collect MELT telemetry and then transforms the raw data into flexible and scalable objects through a flexible, entity-centric model. Full-stack observability requires the combination of all MELT types, and the Cisco FSO Platform is a complete MELT platform. AppDynamics also uses MELT telemetry, using the acronym MELTT: Metrics, Events, Logs, Traces, and Topology. Topology anchors every MELT telemetry signal. This MELT data collection is fundamentally critical to getting a more complete observability view across diverse IT environments.
While using Cisco FSO combined with AppDynamics is very powerful and provides even greater visibility, each solution on its own provides some pretty significant customer benefits.
Here are five examples of how Cisco FSO benefits customers:
1. Hybrid application monitoring: Cisco Full-Stack Observability (Cisco FSO) allows IT teams to monitor the performance of traditional and hybrid applications, proactively finding and resolving issues.
2. Cloud-native application monitoring: Cisco FSO can also be used to track the performance of cloud-native applications across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, allowing IT teams to proactively find and prioritize issues based on their impact on the business.
3. Customer digital experience monitoring: By correlating network metrics and intelligence with application performance data, Cisco FSO can help IT teams, quickly and easily pinpoint anything that is impacting the user experience.
4. Application dependency monitoring: Combining real-time application dependency mapping data with network data allows IT teams to find and fix network and service issues based on their impact on the business.
5. Secure, stable, and superior digital experiences: Cisco FSO gives IT teams control with full-stack observability, allowing them to prioritize issues affecting users, revenue, business risks, and costs. This minimizes tool sprawl and makes problem-solving faster and simpler.
Here are five examples of how AppDynamics benefits customers:
1. Application performance monitoring: AppDynamics provides real-time visibility into application performance across complex distributed environments.
2. End-user monitoring: AppDynamics allows IT teams to monitor the end-user experience across web, mobile, and IoT applications.
3. Infrastructure visibility: AppDynamics provides visibility into the underlying infrastructure supporting applications, including servers, databases, containers, and more.
4. Business performance monitoring: AppDynamics correlates application performance with business outcomes to help IT teams prioritize issues based on their impact on revenue, customer experience, and more.
5. Automated root cause analysis: AppDynamics uses machine learning to automatically identify the root cause of performance issues in real-time.
After seeing what each can do independently, it becomes clearer in regards to even greater value by using both Cisco FSO and AppDynamics together, Customers can benefit from a more complete observability capability that provides greater visibility into application performance across complex distributed environments. This allows IT teams to deliver secure, stable, and superior digital experiences by proactively finding and resolving issues that impact users, revenue, business risks, and costs.
In comparison to other observability solutions, AppDynamics and Cisco FSO offer a unique combination of capabilities that allow IT teams to gain insights, prioritize issues, and deliver secure, stable, and superior digital experiences to their customers.
While there are many other observability solutions available on the market, such as Splunk, New Relic, Dynatrace, and Observe, the combination of AppDynamics and Cisco FSO provides a more comprehensive solution for monitoring the performance of traditional, hybrid, and cloud-native applications across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
Customer Benefits & Sales Positioning
Businesses can benefit from using Full Stack Observability technology in several ways. Full Stack Observability provides real visibility of your environment, enabling businesses to monitor and analyze their entire technology stack, from infrastructure to applications. This provides real-time insights into system performance, allowing businesses to quickly identify and resolve issues, improve user experiences, and optimize their operations.
As an executive salesperson attempting to sell a Full Stack Observability offering from one of the previously listed manufacturers to a corporate or enterprise client, here are five things that you should consider informing and hopefully persuade your prospect or customer about the merits and capabilities of FSO:
1. Improve system performance: By monitoring the entire technology stack in real-time, businesses can quickly identify and resolve issues that may be impacting system performance. This can help improve the system's overall performance, leading to better user experiences and increased productivity.
2. Reduce downtime: Full Stack Observability technology can help businesses to proactively identify and resolve issues before they result in system downtime. This can help to reduce the frequency and duration of downtime events, leading to improved business continuity and reduced costs.
3. Optimize resource usage: By monitoring resource usage across the entire technology stack, businesses can identify areas where resources are being underutilized or overutilized. This can help businesses optimize resource usage, leading to cost savings and improved efficiency.
4. Improve decision-making: Full-stack observability technology gives businesses real-time insights into their systems and operations. This information can be used to inform decision-making, helping businesses to make better decisions that are based on data rather than intuition.
Talk Track with Context: Full Stack Observability technology can provide businesses with a range of benefits that can help them improve their operations, reduce costs, and make better decisions through having end-to-end visibility into their services and operations. Remember, many of these organizations are still clinging to the disparate best-of-breed approach that nearly all of them subscribed to prior. The promise of being able to integrate all of these disparate solutions to get a complete single pane of glass view was never realized, and most of them are extremely frustrated with what they have, as it exposes them to outages, poor performance, and security issues. Cisco FSO and/or AppDynamics can deliver on that promise.
Concerns or Objections
Some potential or likely objections that a prospect may have when considering an FSO offering include concerns about cost, complexity, and integration with existing systems. Here are several ways that an executive salesperson might overcome these objections:
1. Cost: The salesperson could highlight the potential cost savings that can be achieved through improved system performance, reduced downtime, and optimized resource usage. They could also provide examples of other businesses that have achieved significant cost savings through the use of FSO technology.
2. Complexity: The salesperson could demonstrate how easy it is to use the FSO technology, highlighting its user-friendly interface and intuitive features. They could also provide training and support to help the client get up and running with the technology.
3. Integration: The salesperson could highlight the flexibility of the FSO technology, demonstrating how it can be easily integrated with the client’s existing systems. They could also provide examples of other businesses successfully integrating FSO technology with their existing systems.
By addressing these objections and highlighting the benefits of FSO technology, an executive salesperson can effectively convince a corporate or enterprise client to buy an FSO offering from one of the previously listed manufacturers.
Target Customer Segments
The target customer segments for Full Stack Observability technology include businesses of all sizes that rely on complex technology stacks to deliver their products and services. This includes companies in industries such as finance, healthcare, retail, and more. These businesses require real-time insights into their systems to ensure optimal performance and user experiences.
Education
Full Stack Observability (FSO) is a powerful tool that can help K-12 and higher education institutions face common technology challenges both reactively and proactively. Some of the key selling points for FSO to K-12s and Higher Education prospects include:
1. Cybersecurity: With the virtual classrooms and online learning environment added to in-classroom learning, school districts are more focused on cybersecurity than ever before. FSO can help schools monitor their systems for potential threats and vulnerabilities.
2. Broadband and Connectivity: The pandemic proved that the education system in the U.S. was not fully equipped to support a hybrid learning model as it requires students, teachers, and administrators to have 24/7 access. FSO can help schools monitor their wireless infrastructure and ensure that students have reliable off-campus connectivity.
3. IT Adoption and Digital Learning Capabilities: Colleges and universities are starting to modernize legacy services and applications as students increasingly emphasize digital capabilities as a deciding factor in choosing higher education. FSO can help schools monitor the performance of their digital services and ensure that they meet their students' needs.
4. Hiring/Retaining IT Talent: Higher education is starting to focus on hiring and retaining top IT talent to support the importance of cutting-edge technology to students that is up and running 24/7. FSO can help schools monitor their IT environments and draw useful insights from dynamic IT environments.
5. Cross-Team Collaboration: Information silos are a common unintended consequence of growth at educational institutions, and they can slow down efforts to resolve issues in critical academic services. FSO can help schools break down these silos and enable cross-team collaboration to resolve platform issues quickly.
Given that education environments, including schools, colleges, and universities, have diverse systems, including IT, IoT, learning management systems, student information systems, and many others, there are numerous opportunities as they upgrade outdated systems or acquire new systems to support their expanding needs.
Local Government
Full Stack Observability (FSO) is a powerful tool that can help local governments reactively and proactively face common technology challenges. Some of the key selling points for FSO to local government prospects include:
1. Cloud Migration: The local government’s transition to the cloud is well underway. However, significant hurdles remain to get the others onboard with cloud services. FSO can help local governments monitor their cloud infrastructure and ensure that they are meeting the needs of their citizens.
2. Network Visibility: Many local government IT teams lack the network visibility necessary to manage the hybrid environments adequately or the clouds they suddenly find themselves responsible for. FSO can help local governments monitor their entire IT stack and draw useful insights from dynamic IT environments.
3. Observability: A recent research report from Splunk reveals that nearly 80% of public sector organizations are beginning to understand and deploy observability technologies. FSO can help local governments break down these silos and enable cross-team collaboration to resolve platform issues quickly.
4. Hybrid Environments: Complex, hybrid, multi-cloud environments can complicate the already daunting task of seeing and managing workloads in disparate locations and platforms. FSO can help local governments monitor their entire IT stack, from end-user experience to infrastructure health, and understand how everything is connected, including all the relationships and interdependencies between any layers, components, or pieces of code.
Given that local government prospects and customers have very diverse environments that include some combination of IT, SCADA, ICS, IoT, Fleet, Power, Water, and CJIS, there are bountiful opportunities as they replace old systems and or need to acquire new systems to support their expanding environments.
HealthCare/Hospitals
Full Stack Observability (FSO) is a powerful tool that can help healthcare organizations, especially hospitals, face common technology challenges both reactively and proactively. Some of the key selling points for FSO to health care, especially hospital prospects, include:
1. Application Performance: Applications have become essential to the daily operations of healthcare organizations, assisting with scheduling appointments, virtual doctor visits, accessing medical records, and conducting tests. When applications fail, it can lead to issues such as long delays in patients receiving the care they need and doctors becoming backlogged. FSO can help hospitals monitor the performance of their applications and ensure that they are meeting the needs of their patients.
2. Patient Expectations: Patients’ needs have changed over the last few years, and apps and digital services have become critical to their lives. Perfect performance is even more imperative with how closely apps are now tied to patients' physical and mental health. FSO can help hospitals monitor their digital services and ensure patients can connect to the information, medication, service, or physician needed.
3. IT Complexity: As healthcare organizations embrace digital transformation, their IT infrastructure has become complex. IT teams need a way to balance their digital transformation priorities while effectively monitoring IT continuously across their environment. FSO can help hospitals monitor their entire IT stack and draw useful insights from their increasingly dynamic IT environments.
4. Cross-Domain Insight: Traditional infrastructure and application monitoring tools have limitations when it comes to providing cross-domain and service delivery insight. FSO can help hospitals break down these silos and enable cross-team collaboration to resolve platform issues quickly.
5. Holistic View: Modern tech ecosystems tend to be composed of more complex multi-cloud environments and higher levels of telemetry data. FSO can help hospitals monitor their entire IT stack, from end-user experience to infrastructure health, and understand how everything is connected, including all the relationships and interdependencies between any layers, components, or pieces of code.
Healthcare organizations, especially hospitals, are the type of digitally transformed organizations that can truly benefit from Full Stack Observability as they have little to no tolerance for any service outages or issues, given the criticality of their services to those in need. FSO combined with an XDR to IR platform is a great thing to position for hospitals as they will see true and deep value quickly, and they have funds to invest in these types of offerings that support low latency and real-time technologies found at hospitals.
Commercial & Enterprise
Full Stack Observability (FSO) is a powerful tool that can help commercial organizations reactively and proactively face common technology challenges. Some of the key selling points for FSO to commercial, non-public sector prospects include:
1. Application Performance: Applications have become essential to commercial organizations, assisting with scheduling appointments, virtual meetings, accessing records, and conducting transactions. When applications fail, it can lead to issues such as long delays in customers receiving the service they need and employees becoming backlogged. FSO can help commercial organizations monitor the performance of their applications and ensure that they are meeting the needs of their customers.
2. Customer Expectations: Customers’ needs have changed over the last few years, and apps and digital services have become critical to their daily lives. Near-perfect performance is even more imperative with how closely apps are now tied to physical and financial well-being. FSO can help commercial organizations monitor their digital services and ensure that customers can connect to the information, product, service, or representative they need.
3. IT Complexity: As commercial organizations embrace digital transformation, their IT infrastructure has grown in complexity IT pros need a way to balance their digital transformation priorities while effectively monitoring IT continuously across their environment. FSO can help commercial organizations monitor their entire IT stack and draw useful insights from their increasingly dynamic IT environments.
4. Cross-Domain Insight: Traditional infrastructure and application monitoring tools have limitations when it comes to providing cross-domain and service delivery insight. FSO can help commercial organizations break down these silos and enable cross-team collaboration to resolve platform issues quickly
5. Holistic View: Modern tech ecosystems tend to be composed of more complex multi-cloud hybrid environments and higher levels of telemetry data. FSO can help commercial organizations monitor their entire IT stack, from end-user experience to infrastructure health, and understand how everything is connected, including all the relationships and interdependencies between any layers and components.
The first three selling points are the ones that appeal to commercial and enterprise customers, given their current visibility is typically made up of disparate best-of-breed applications loosely integrated and requiring the IT team to monitor numerous consoles. This makes for a perfect opportunity for an FSO pitch.
Relevant Use-Cases
These are just some of the relevant use cases that you can reference when describing to a prospect or customer. Some of the us-cases are hypothetical, and some are based on real occurrences.
Here are four different hypothetical use cases for FSO with a K-12 school, university, or hospital:
1. Improving Online Learning: A K-12 school faces challenges with its online learning platform, with students and teachers experiencing frequent technical issues and disruptions. The school’s IT team uses FSO to monitor the platform's performance and identify the root cause of the issues. With this information, they can make targeted improvements to the platform, resulting in a smoother and more reliable online learning experience for students and teachers.
2. Enhancing Patient Care: A hospital is looking to improve the quality of care they provide to their patients. They use FSO to monitor the performance of their electronic health record (EHR) system, which is critical for providing timely and accurate information to doctors and nurses. By identifying and addressing performance issues with the EHR system, the hospital can improve the efficiency of its care delivery and enhance the overall patient experience.
3. Streamlining University Operations: A university is facing challenges with managing its complex IT infrastructure, which includes multiple systems for student records, course management, and financial aid. They use FSO to gain a holistic view of their entire IT stack, allowing them to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in their operations. With this information, they can streamline their processes and improve the overall efficiency of the university.
4. Ensuring Cybersecurity: A K-12 school is concerned about potential cyber attacks on its network, which could compromise sensitive student data. They use FSO to monitor their network for potential threats and vulnerabilities, allowing them to proactively address any security issues before they can be exploited by attackers.
18-Month Forecast
In terms of future outlooks for these manufacturers in the next eighteen months or so:
Businesses will increasingly adopt this technology to gain real-time insights into their systems and improve their operations.
Strong demand, especially for low-latency service organizations, real-time environments, and organizations that provide critical services.
AI is being introduced into many of these FSO offerings and highlighted in their product marketing, as the target audience is increasingly expecting it.
Market leaders like Datadog, Dynatrace, and New Relic are expected to continue doing well.
Challengers like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services are also expected to perform well due to their position as cloud providers with a mixture of tools that can lead to an observability platform.
Cisco FSO is expected to perform well due to its ability to prioritize issues affecting users, revenue, business risks, and costs while minimizing tool sprawl.
AppDynamics is also expected to perform well due to its end-to-end transaction tracing capabilities.
36-Month Forecast
In terms of future outlooks for these manufacturers in the next 36 months or so:
· Expect to see further consolidation in the Full Stack Observability technology market as larger players acquire smaller competitors.
Predicting which manufacturers may fall behind in such a rapidly evolving market is difficult.
However, it is worth noting that there is still plenty of room for growth in the observability market; CD Insights reports that while 90% of organizations report observability as holding strategic value, less than 40% have actually implemented observability initiatives to date. This suggests that there is still significant potential for growth among all manufacturers in this market.
· Anticipate that using artificial intelligence and machine learning will become increasingly prevalent in this market, enabling businesses to gain even deeper insights into their systems.