Scenario

Founded in 1995 with a single location in a college town in North Carolina. Popularity quickly grew with expansion to 50 locations (primarily in college towns). In 2008, they launched their first eCommerce site. Eventually, in 2017 the organization decided to focus their efforts on online sales by strengthening their partnership with other non-tea beverage companies and closing their retail locations.

With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, orders exploded. Fortunately, because the company had a vertical monopoly throughout the supply chain, they did not experience supply chain issues like others did. However, the explosive growth has had a major impact on the eCommerce business, and customers are starting to switch to other vendors. Issues have ranged from incorrectly provisioned infrastructure to SLA violations from the company’s 3rd party providers to rushed deployments that result in issues with their eCommerce application.

Previously, the company’s technology team worked in various siloed groupings focused on specific areas such as application, infrastructure, cloud, and security. To address these growing issues, Bridge to Possibili-Tea is undertaking a two-fold effort: to procure a solution that provides end-to-end visibility from the customer’s vantage point through the online presence, and to better unify the technology team’s various pillars behind a common language and goal. Bridge to Possibili-Tea is looking to Cisco to solve some of these issues and take back control of their business.

Why Cisco

Think about how we consume products and services today – How we order groceries, how we do banking, apply for loans etc. For all this, we are using a lot more web/mobile applications and digital services.

Applications being at the centerstage, organizations want to make their application available 24X7 and make sure their data is secure. They want to do all this while optimizing the cost. So applications are definitely increasing in importance – more so now than anytime in the past.

Today’s App is a collection of services and these services can be from anywhere – it could be in private DC, it could be from public cloud, it could be from SaaS, it could be from anywhere for that matter. It’s beyond human scale now to monitor everything that impacts the applications. DevOps & AppOpps, NetOps, InfraOps and SecOps teams need to be able to work together to see the full stack of available data across the entire digital experience.

Cisco’s approach to delivering full-stack observability starts with these core foundations:

  • AppDynamics follows the user from the device, over the network, and into the application and underlying infrastructure. It not only monitors across all of the different domains but also correlates those insights back to the business – applying context to everything so organizations know where to focus. AppD also provides a deeper understanding of the user and can ensure that end-user issues are identified proactively.
  • Cisco Secure Application simplifies the life cycle of vulnerability fixes and security incidents by creating shared context across Application and Security teams. It extends the current performance monitoring capabilities of AppDynamics to provide continuous monitoring for vulnerabilities, runtime detection of exploits, and real-time defense against a broad range of attacks.
  • Intersight provides infrastructure optimization which enables application-assured infrastructure. When there is an app issue at any layer of the stack, whether it be in the cloud or on prem, Workload Optimizer can quantify the changes that need to be made to improve the performance of the app itself, AND execute those actions in an automated manner.
  • ThousandEyes makes Internet look like your own network. It is like Google Maps of Internet. It enables organizations to proactively diagnose network issues that could be impacting their users’ experience. It not only gives you real time visibility into the issue, but also acts like a security camera. You can go back in time and prove where the root cause of the problem was for the issue that you faced say 3 days back at 2pm.

Organizations want the ability to see where across the stack their problem is occurring and why? Most importantly they need to tie performance back to their business metrics. They want to be alerted if there are issues that are impacting the business performance of the application. They want to prioritize actions based on business and user experience impact. People and teams can now make decisions with full observability across the full stack.

In FSO, our strategy is to deliver an outcome (not a product or solution) for our customers. With Cisco FSO Platform, organizations finally have a solution that addresses all the pieces of the puzzle to deliver a world class User Experience and drives transformation.

When fully integrated, AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, and Intersight provide observability across the entire stack of applications, infrastructure (network and cloud, compute, storage), and security with real-time insights correlated across domains and integrated with business context.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability provides a unified view of resource allocation, infrastructure, and security to provide you with the ability to fine-tune an application ecosystem to provide the optimal application experience while maintaining key performance indicators (KPI) in these areas.


Performance

  • How does the application respond to end-user requests?
  • Are there any delays that result in lost revenue?
  • Can you trace customer complaints back to problems with the network or infrastructure?
  • Or is something else causing dissatisfaction?


Resource Optimization

  • Are the resources sufficient to provide a satisfactory end-user experience?
  • Are you funding unused resources that should be released to improve your return on investment?
  • Can the application front-end successfully reach the back-end efficiently?
  • Are any services provided by third-party applications causing delays or incomplete requests?


Security

  • Are all application components current enough to avoid hacking attempts?
  • Have there been any attempts to compromise the application?
  • Are all communication paths secure?

The solution provides a central point that you use to monitor and control all the organizations connected to applications: AppOps & DevOps, NetOps, InfraOps, and SecOps. 


The following image breaks down these areas into components of interest upon which all business KPIs depend.

Next, we’ll take a look at the topology of the lab environment before we start performing the prerequisite setup steps for the lab.

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