Here at Moogsoft, we’re getting ready to head off to the first big event of 2018, Cisco Live Europe — no longer in Berlin this year, having moved to Barcelona.
This is always a good show for enterprise IT. Given how central Cisco is to modern business, Cisco Live is far from being just an opportunity to show off a new router or whatever. There are always a multitude of hardware and software vendors — over 150 this year — showing off their latest technologies and demonstrating how it can address customers’ needs. To give you a flavor, we recorded a couple of videos at Cisco Live Europe in Berlin last year, discussing big data and analytics in general, and Moogsoft in particular.
This year’s show will be particularly interesting, as this is the first Cisco Live event since the acquisition of AppDynamics. With that important addition to Cisco’s offering, we can expect that application performance will be a major topic at the show
Cisco is Not Just About Networking
This focus on APM might initially seem surprising, given a superficial expectation that a Cisco event would be all networking, all the time. However, Cisco (and their more forward-looking customers and partners) have long been thinking beyond a narrow focus on the network. Any remaining doubts on that score were comprehensively addressed with the launch of Cisco UCS in 2009.
This year’s IT Superheroes theme for Cisco Live highlights all the different roles that exist in an enterprise IT department. As with all superhero stories, though, there needs to be an overall mission for the superhero team to coalesce around.
To an extent, the division between compute and network that had seemed so fundamental was always artificial. Routers and switches are just somewhat specialized computers, after all. The industry-wide move into converged fabrics and virtualization of both compute and network has only further blurred that boundary. Now, the conversation is moving to deeper integration between an application and the infrastructure it runs on, with resources being provisioned on the fly in response to real-time user demand patterns.
The difficulty is that the various components of this unified application environment might be relatively easy to bring together technically, but they have historically been managed by disconnected teams who did not have much to do with each other. In order to provide the sort of seamless monitoring and management that are key to the joined-up experiences that users demand and expect, there will need to be much closer collaboration between those distinct groups.
Here is where it becomes clear once again that Cisco have been thinking deeply about these issues for some time. This year’s IT Superheroes theme for Cisco Live highlights all the different roles that exist in an enterprise IT department. As with all superhero stories, though, there needs to be an overall mission for the superhero team to coalesce around. In the comics and films, when one member of the team goes off on their own, bad things happen, until they can be persuaded to rejoin the team and work with the others to achieve their common goals. On the other hand, when all of the superheroes are working together, their skills complement each other and they are able to achieve their goals as a team.
Moogsoft and Cisco Make ITOps Into Superheroes
All of this is particularly relevant to Moogsoft, and highlights why Cisco have long been an investor in Moogsoft, a company set up specifically to manage the sorts of issues that these new unified architectures bring to light. First of all, Moogsoft AIOps is able to gather information from all layers of the application stack, and automatically spot relevant and significant events. Secondly, algorithms can identify correlations and place those events into a useful context — whether they be indicators of the availability of physical infrastructure components, or in-depth measurements of application performance. Finally, those clusters of related events can be shown to the right people in the organization, whatever their respective roles, so that they can work together effectively to understand and resolve the underlying issue.
We will be in the Investments Pavilion again this year, and in addition to our regular booth, we will be delivering a couple of presentations in the Investments Pavilion Theatre, on Tuesday at 13:10 and Thursday at 12:35. Otherwise, you can of course drop by our booth at any time for a chat and a demo — we’ll be at Pod IP5, just look for the cow. We would love to show you how we can help unify IT Operations, integrating all the various different roles and helping everyone work together to provide the sort of quality of service that users expect.
See you in Barcelona!
