The Cisco Observability Platform is an extensible software platform that hosts an ecosystem of modules and applications (standalone apps and their enrichments) that provides core capabilities for developers to build observability solutions to gain visibility and actionable insights across their technology and business stack. The Cisco Observability Platform leverages OpenTelemetry™ collections to collect MELT telemetry and then transforms the raw data into flexible and scalable objects through a flexible, entity-centric model. Developers can leverage this OpenTelemetry framework and the Cisco Observability Platform's Unified Query Language (UQL) to create and monetize observability solutions.

The Cisco Observability Platform can serve observability use cases requiring:

  • Data ingestion and transformation of MELT and system data from different environments and clusters
  • Insights based on correlated MELT and system data
  • Network observability within the context of your application
  • Extended functionality of existing Cisco observability, monitoring, and security products
  • Rapid development of 3rd-party "standalone" applications
  • Bespoke user interfaces
  • Alerting and actioning
  • Customized reports

Services and Components 

The Cisco Observability Platform provides the following services to power the applications and modules that you consume:

Service

Definition

OpenTelemetry Ingest

A service that ingests data into the Cisco Observability Platform.

Serverless Functions for Data I/O

A service that deploys and orchestrates Docker containers for custom data ingestion.

Serverless Workflows

A service that transforms MELT data as it flows through the Cisco Observability Platform.

Health Rules and Alerting

A service that allows you to configure rules that govern the behavior of the UI and alerts that you receive.

Access Control

A service that allows admins to configure access for different users of the Cisco Observability Platform.

Application/Module Lifecycle Management including knowledge and object storage

A service that manages the lifecycle of applications and modules as well as their associated objects and artifacts.

MELT Store

A service that manages and stores MELT data ingested by the Cisco Observability Platform.

Extensible User Interface

A service that provides an extensible and configuration driven UI.

Query Engine and Query Language (UQL)

A service that allows applications, modules, and users to query data on the Cisco Observability Platform.

The Cisco Observability Platform consists of the following components:

  • Data processing: The core of the Cisco Observability Platform that is responsible for handling various data-related tasks such as modeling, ingestion, storage, and querying.
  • Developer support: The set of tools and components provided by the Cisco Observability Platform that developers use to create solutions.
  • Account administration: The online services for managing Cisco Observability Platform accounts, including viewing and managing tenant access, users, roles, permissions, and subscriptions.
  • Cisco Observability Platform Exchange: The online venue where end users of the Cisco Observability Platform can discover and subscribe to applications and modules. The exchange also enables developers to list and market their solutions to Cisco Observability Platform customers.

Deployment 

All Cisco Observability Platform modules are software-as-a-service (SaaS) products. No deployment is necessary for initial access. However, to deploy Cisco AppDynamics collectors on your cloud-based Kubernetes cluster, you need to download binaries and follow deployment instructions. See Install Kubernetes and App Service Monitoring.

SaaS Region Support 

Observability Platform tenants are available in the following AWS Local Zones:

  • US West: us-west-2-pdx-1a
  • Frankurt: eu-central-1

This means that any data you send to any Cisco Observability Platform modules, including any personal data, is stored in the AWS Local Zones, and should only be provided to Cisco AppDynamics if you have the appropriate rights and consent for such provision.

OpenTelemetry™ and Kubernetes® (as applicable) are trademarks of The Linux Foundation®.