Cisco and AppDynamics unveil vision for the 'Central Nervous System for IT'

AppDynamics, a Cisco company, has revealed its new vision for delivering IT, which it says will “ignite a new era of AIOps.”

Described as the “Central Nervous System for IT”, Cisco and AppDynamics are building an open platform that the companies say will deliver full visibility, insights and automated actions across applications, infrastructures and networks.

In doing so, it will work in a similar way to how the human central nervous system takes information from all our senses and coordinates actions throughout our bodies.

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“Today’s application environments are incredibly complex, distributed and dynamic, making it difficult for IT professionals to effectively support business objectives,” said David Wadhwani, CEO of AppDynamics.

“Along with Cisco, we’re empowering IT Operations to start their journey into the new era of AIOps with real-time visibility and AI and Machine Learning based insight and automation that ultimately drive improved customer experiences and business performance.”

The first part of this strategy revolves around visibility: the platform ingests data from every domain such as applications, infrastructure, and network.

Then, by using machine learning, the Central Nervous System produces insights that save time. This means that businesses can focus on improving customer experience and business results.

Finally, the system will work with orchestration and automation systems to take actions that can remedy any problems or optimise results.

For example, this might include responding to incidents, intelligent workload placement, and cloud cost optimisation.

“IT teams are drowning in data coming from modern application environments that span multiple clouds, containers, and microservices, making it incredibly difficult to find the root cause when there is an issue with an application. At the same time, businesses are under pressure to ensure flawless user experiences every time someone uses their app,” said Nancy Gohring, senior analyst at 451 Research.

“AIOps tools – those that can intelligently analyse the breadth of data generated by modern systems – are key to serving the needs of both business and IT constituents in this challenging environment.”