Cisco Cloud Observability Data

Cisco Cloud Observability supports collecting data from the following sources:

• Applications
• Cloud service providers
• On-premises hosts
• Prometheus
• Kubernetes
• Databases

Cisco Cloud Observability ingests MELT data in OpenTelemetry™ Line Protocol (OTLP) format. We recommend checking if the data sources you want to integrate support OTLP. 

Data Collection Models

Cisco Cloud Observability receives MELT data related to cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure, as well as applications, from OpenTelemetry-compatible collectors. MELT data reflects the state of your entire system and is primarily related to observability. When you receive the MELT data, Cisco Cloud Observability may enrich the data to provide you with higher visibility and proactive troubleshooting.

In contrast, Cisco AppDynamics APM receives data from proprietary, language-specific agents that you configure and deploy in your infrastructure. Data from agents can be related to applications, end users, hardware, mobile platforms, databases, and so on, but not necessarily cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure.

Entities 

An entity represents a system that Cisco Cloud Observability observes and collects data about. Entity types include databases, services, applications, hosts, or other infrastructure components. Cisco Cloud Observability creates ECPs for each entity type that provide entity-specific performance metrics.

Entity Types

Entities are categorized into specific types. Types help in modeling different entities discovered from various sources. A type refers to a specific category of an entity—for example, disk, machine, instance, and service are different types of entities. The type governs the characteristics of an entity.

For all entities created in the Cisco Observability Platform, you must define an entity type in the domain model schema.

Entity Relationships

Entities typically do not exist in isolation but co-exist with other entities of similar or other types. These entities are often related, and the relationships (for example, parent/child) are useful in understanding and configuring a model framework. The Cisco Observability Platform domain model entity object has an attribute named parentType that contains a reference to the entity type from which the entity inherits characteristics.