Cisco AppDynamics expands its view

of customer environments, integrates

with ThousandEyes
Analysts - Liam Rogers, Mike Fratto

Publication date: Tuesday, June 8 2021

Introduction
AppDynamics has benefited from being a part of the Cisco portfolio and has integrated with several
of its parent's technologies. Earlier this year, the company added AppDynamics with Cisco Secure
Application to the platform as a result of partnering with the Cisco security group. Now,
AppDynamics is further strengthening its ties to the broader Cisco portfolio by integrating with
ThousandEyes to add greater network and user visibility within its dashboard. This integration also
plays into an effort to provide a platform that can be both wide-reaching and granular in its ability to
observe as much of customer environments as possible.

The 451 Take

By integrating with ThousandEyes, AppDynamics can paint a more detailed picture of end-user
experience as it combines browser-based synthetic and internet monitoring with its existing real
user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic capabilities. As the idea that vendors can and should provide
wide-reaching observability platforms that can meet a wealth of customer needs continues to take
root, vendors like AppDynamics must expand their capabilities to remain competitive. However,
AppDynamics will have to demonstrate for customers that growth in multiple directions is not just a
way to expand its total addressable market and that integrations will be thorough and well
executed.
Organizations often leverage observability platforms to address immediate problems in their
environments and thus there is the expectation that moving through them needs to be as fluid and
streamlined as possible. Cisco will want to demonstrate that AppDynamics and ThousandEyes are
not simply two products being connected, but two important aggregators of data that can be tied
together in context to ideally offer insights that would have otherwise been impossible in order for
customers to be able to justify subscribing to yet another service. Not all vendors with APM roots

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 Cisco AppDynamics expands its view of customer environments, integrates with ThousandEyes

will be able to draw on the networking strength that a parent company like Cisco has, and this is
something that we expect AppDynamics will continue to tap into to differentiate.

Details
In August 2020, Cisco completed its acquisition of ThousandEyes, developer of a cloud-based service
that combines synthetic testing with performance monitoring and provides a view into network,
SaaS applications and public cloud performance across the internet and modern WAN environments.
It gives visualizations and insights into where performance issues are occurring, thereby gaining
additional synthetic and network monitoring capabilities. Cisco had announced several planned
integrations for ThousandEyes, including AppDynamics, and now the company has made good on
that promise.
Synthetic monitoring is one area where ThousandEyes and AppDynamics overlap. The technology is
deployed to simulate end-user usage to test an application or website, which can highlight network
or application performance concerns. RUM is often paired with synthetic as a way to measure
customer experience on an app or website. While these two pairings can be regarded by customers
as 'nice to have,' the rise in e-commerce as a result of COVID-19 has spurred more interest in these
kinds of capabilities.
Functionally, the ThousandEyes integration brings certain elements, such as network latency and
response time, into the AppDynamics dashboard. Data from both platforms can be displayed side by
side for high-level views, but if users want to dive deeper into the data from ThousandEyes, they can
click through to get to the ThousandEyes dashboard to explore network flow maps and granular
metrics. By presenting data from both platforms within the AppDynamics dashboard, users can
potentially speed up mean time to repair by being able to quickly see what KPIs are being impacted
and then isolate whether an event is network-related.
As it stands, users need to be an existing ThousandEyes customer to get this combined functionality.
Although both services fall within the Cisco portfolio, enterprises are currently trying to consolidate
siloed tooling that is only adding to the complexity of their environments. AppDynamics says this
integration is a way to break down silos by bringing application and network operations teams
together, but from a functionality and UI perspective, it will want to make this integration seamless
so that it feels less like separate tools in practice. Creating pricing bundles could be a way to entice
AppDynamics customers that are not yet ThousandEyes customers and interested in the
functionality, but potentially hesitant to add more monitoring tooling to their environments.
Aside from expanding their ability to span as much of the IT stack as possible, many observability
vendors are also grappling with which personas in an organization to present data to and how to
present it in the most useful way. With the inclusion of AppDynamics with Cisco Secure Application
and ThousandEyes, AppDynamics is making an effort to bridge the gap to security and networking
teams. More vendors, AppDynamics included, also hope to surface business KPI-related insights to
higher levels of management to help prioritize response and validate resolution, and this is where
AppDynamics' Business iQ service comes in. Ultimately, AppDynamics is aiming to pitch its offering
as a 'business observability' platform to connect many aspects of an enterprise in a way that
contextualizes data and serves up meaningful insights across an organization. It has many of the
pieces assembled, and must now finesse the integration.

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