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Customers can identify out-of-date agents and upgrade them in minutes with an easy-to-use centralized agent management user interface.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

The Latest

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

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