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Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics Released

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Customers can identify out-of-date agents and upgrade them in minutes with an easy-to-use centralized agent management user interface.

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 minimizing risk of security vulnerabilities. Smart Agent can roll-back or upgrade agents at scale with speed and agility, allowing operations teams to perform these tasks 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 visualize 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, SVP and GM, 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."

Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics is now generally available. The auto-deployment functionality will be generally available in CYQ2 2024.

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Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics Released

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 centralized agent management user interface.

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 minimizing risk of security vulnerabilities. Smart Agent can roll-back or upgrade agents at scale with speed and agility, allowing operations teams to perform these tasks 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 visualize 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, SVP and GM, 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."

Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics is now generally available. The auto-deployment functionality will be generally available in CYQ2 2024.

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Technology leaders across the federal landscape are facing, and will continue to face, an uphill battle when it comes to fortifying their digital environments against hostile and persistent threat actors. On one hand, they are being asked to push digital transformation ... On the other hand, they are facing the fiscal uncertainty of continuing resolutions (CR) and government shutdowns looming near and far. In the face of these challenges, CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs must figure out how to modernize legacy systems and infrastructure while doing more with less and still defending against external and internal threats ...

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...