AppDynamics, a Cisco company, unveiled Cognition Engine, the company's next generation of application performance monitoring.

Cognition Engine builds on AppDynamics’ baseline, transaction snapshots and business analytics to deliver application performance diagnostics and automated root-cause analysis that has the ability to reduce resolution times from minutes to seconds. Cognition Engine extends AIOps to the application, introducing new levels of insight that empower modern businesses with a competitive edge in the digital economy.

“Cognition Engine turns traditional APM on its head. Rather than chasing symptoms, the top suspects for root cause are automatically surfaced. That level of insight completely changes the game for IT, freeing them of tedious tasks and empowering them to focus on creating business impact,” said JF Huard, CTO Data Science at AppDynamics. “Cognition Engine ultimately empowers enterprises to embrace an AIOps mindset – valuing proaction over reaction, answers over investigation and, most importantly, never losing focus on customer experience or business performance.”

At Cognition Engine’s core is AppDynamics’ Business Transaction and machine learning expertise from Perspica, which joined the AppDynamics team in 2017. The integration of these technologies is the foundation of AppDynamics Cognition Engine:

- Anomaly Detection: Cognition Engine constantly evolves, training and evaluating data in real-time as it enters the system using streaming analytics technology. It ingests, processes, and analyzes millions of records per second automatically understanding how metrics correlate and instantly knowing when there’s a break in correlation among datasets. Because it automatically evaluates healthy behavior, there is minimal need for user configuration out of the box. Problems can be detected in minutes, even hours before systems that rely on traditional thresholding, giving IT a head start on the fixing the problem before its customers notice.

- Automated Root Cause Analysis: To alleviate hours of tedious manual analysis spent on curated data, Cognition Engine automatically isolates metrics that deviate from normal behavior, as determined by machine-learned correlation, to present the top suspects of root cause for any application issue. By clearly showing the impact of those deviating metrics on the poor performance for mission critical Business Transactions, it drastically reduces resources spent on identifying root causes and the need for experience in performance monitoring.

Cognition Engine is available to SaaS customers at no additional cost.