Cisco launched Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics, enabling agent lifecycle management, dramatically simplifying application instrumentation for full-stack observability through intelligent agent automation and management, and helping customers onboard new applications faster. Customers can identify out-of-date agents and upgrade them in minutes with an easy-to-use centralised agent management user interface.
As applications become more distributed, modular and scalable, technologists find themselves managing an explosion in the number of agents. While in many companies, the operations teams are dealing with agents in the tens of thousands, those at large enterprises often handle hundreds of thousands of agents, depending on the number and type of applications being observed. Due to the sheer volume of agents — and the time-consuming and complex nature of updating them — many organisations fail to upgrade to the latest versions in a timely fashion. This leaves them with old and unsupported agents, without the latest functionality, and at risk from security vulnerabilities that have been mitigated in the most recent agent releases.
IT infrastructure and operations teams require powerful insights to help cut through this increasing complexity, and with Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics, customers can:
Simplify the process of installing and upgrading agents: New UI-driven process intelligently automates the installation and upgrade of agents, simplifying the process to just a few clicks. This allows customers to upgrade multiple agents at one time, freeing up resources and talent to focus on the management of application performance.
Access new capabilities faster with push-button upgrades: Smart Agent makes it easy to maintain compliance and upgrade agents on a regular basis, ensuring customers have the latest versions and access to new functionality, while minimising risk of security vulnerabilities. Smart Agent can roll-back or upgrade agents at scale with speed and agility, allowing operations teams to perform through the UI rather than manual actions on each host.
Gain valuable application performance and business insights at speed: Complicated process discovery and time-consuming agent deployments can make it challenging to obtain the visibility and insight into application performance that is needed to deliver optimal user experience and business outcomes. Smart Agent automates the new application instrumentation process with a single agent install that discovers all the processes running on the host, and automatically instruments the full-stack with the agents needed, as governed by a company’s own policies. Smart Agent auto-discovery and auto-deployment enables customers to start collecting data and visualise application topography in minutes instead of days.
“Cisco is committed to using automation and intelligence to give time back to our customers, helping them to reduce the stresses and inefficiencies caused by ever-increasingly complex technology environments,” said Ronak Desai, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability. “Smart Agent will alleviate that pressure, allowing IT teams to focus less on agent management and more on innovation.”
“Keeping all application performance monitoring agents updated with the latest versions can be difficult, especially in large-scale applications. We are eagerly looking forward to using Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics to simplify this process, allowing us to be more responsive and take advantage of new agent-based features as they are released,” said Brad Johns, Manager, Solutions Architecture, Sabre.
