Your digital experience is now intrinsically linked to the success of your business. 70% of customer interactions are now digital, and the expectations of those customers have never been higher. There is a demand for an acceptable level of experience, with availability, performance and consistency all helping to influence their buying decisions and brand loyalty. But this isn’t a customer-centric challenge. Your digital experiences extends to the employees that rely on key applications to perform their role every day.
With so much weight placed on your digital experience, understanding the right levers to pull, and when to pull them, can be the difference maker when looking to enhance the digital interactions you deliver. But this is challenging when the key contributors to your eventual experience – your applications, the infrastructure powering them, and the networks that deliver them – all exist in disparate siloes. These disconnects make it almost impossible to understand not just where these elements intersect, but their collective impact on the quality of your experience.
But what if you could break down these traditional siloes and see your digital experience through a new lens? One that brings real-time business context to the insights derived from across your technology stack? That’s exactly what you can achieve with full-stack observability (FSO) from Cisco, and below, we explain more about what FSO is, and how it can you transform your digital experience to drive continued business success.
What is full-stack observability?
Using a combination of world-class tools, including AppDynamics, ThousandEyes and Cisco Intersight, FSO delivers real-time observability across every area of your technology stack, including your applications, network, compute infrastructure and storage.
Crucially, this goes beyond visibility into these siloes that you may already have traditional monitoring tools deployed for and believe you have covered. FSO breaks down the siloes and correlates real-time data with business metrics like sales, inventory, and customers on your website to provide context that informs the true assessment of performance and helps you optimise your environment for both cost and business outcome. But how does this additional context translate to better digital experience?
1) Faster resolutions support greater consistency
As a minimum, your users and customers expect your digital platforms, including key applications, to perform consistently, and be available when you need them. Intermittent issues and peaks and troughs in performance will lead to frustration that hampers business performance and productivity in equal measure. This places huge importance on the swift identification and resolution of issues, but with the various elements of your technology stack orchestrated by siloed teams, finding the root cause of an issue and outlining the best actions for remediation is no simple task. Every department will plead its own case, which leads to finger point and the traditional ‘’war room’’ scenario that ultimately thwarts progress and further delays resolution time, hampering the experience delivered.
FSO aligns previously disconnected teams with shared business context and observability across all areas of the technology stack. Everyone is working from the same page which supports faster issue identification and remediation to ensure the consistent and elevated digital experiences that customers and users demand.
2) Prioritise based on business impact
To truly enhance your digital experience, you must understand the performance of every step in the “supply chain” and its correlation with business impact., This goes beyond the real-time data provided by monitoring tools into the health and availability of areas like apps or infrastructure. You need insights into how this information correlates with the actual business metrics used to measure success. For example, if a network issue is hampering the performance of your retail application, leading to a drop off in traffic before sales are transacted, what does this mean for daily revenue figures, or long-term revenue targets? Having access to contextual information like this can help you assess immediate business impact, and prioritise next steps based on both the implications for experience and the level of impact to the business.
3) Seize new opportunities faster
Empowered with insights across your entire technology stack, you can better see where operational gains and optimisations can be made. As well as access to real-time performance insights, you can model what-if scenarios that accurately forecast capacity needs in areas such as your compute, network and storage resources.
This is especially valuable for businesses that experience fluctuations in demand for their services around seasonal peaks. For example, an online retailer planning for an uplift in application usage during a national holiday could proactively model the expected traffic and take the necessary action to ensure service levels are met during busier periods. Understanding the potential business impact of your experience, and how this could be influenced by changes in user activity or technology enhancements gives you the confidence to act faster and pursue transformation objectives.
Make full-stack observability a reality
Properly adopted, FSO can help your business align siloed teams and a disconnected technology stack to drive better digital experience and the pursuit of business goals. But navigating the path to observability success isn’t only about deploying the right tools. Yes, FSO is built on a combination of tools for application performance, network and infrastructure monitoring, but bringing these tools together, and correlating the collective real-time insights to the business metrics that matter most requires support from an expert partner.
If you’re ready to discover how FSO could help your business elevate your digital experience, discuss your plans with our team, or see the impact for yourself with a free Proof of Value.