CloudFabrix Robotic Data Automation Fabric (RDAF) and Cisco Full Stack Observability
In line with its platform strategy, Cisco launched a vendor-agnostic full-stack observability platform built on OpenTelemetry at its signature North American partner and customer event in Las Vegas, the Cisco Live 2023. With nearly 20,000 attendees, the show was full to the brim with product, strategy and partner announcements.
Scroll to the end of the article to learn more about Cisco Full Stack Observability (FSO) and how CloudFabrix is helping bring Cisco’s vision to life. Here’s everything that went down at the event.
Liz Centoni, Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer and General Manager, Applications announced CloudFabrix as a partner.
“We built this platform (FSO) to be open, extensible, and API driven,” Liz Centon explained in her Cisco Live keynote. “We want to bring the ecosystem along and give you the flexibility that you need. We built this platform natively on open telemetry, for scale, performance, and streaming data as well. We can help you consolidate to fewer tools, collect data from any source, and become that single source of truth in your environment.”
Centoni stressed the importance for Cisco to make the platform extensible and unlock their partner ecosystem. To that end, Liz Centon announced three new ecosystem solutions developed in partnership with CloudFabrix, Evolutio, and Kanari.
“You now have vSphere observability and data modernization from CloudFabrix,” Centoni mentioned. “It generates insights and recommended actions across a hybrid infrastructure and the containerized application stack. You have fintech from Evolutio. This gives you business insights by monitoring KPIs based on data ingested, such as payments and credit card authorization. And then the capacity planner and forecaster from Kanari. It provides that visibility into time series data, with risk factors enabled by predictive ML algorithms.”
The CFX pod in the DevNet area saw interesting conversations and demos. The DevNet zone is where attendees get hands-on with Cisco tools and code and leverage ready-to-use code samples, technical support and community interaction.
CloudFabrix CMO Shailesh Manjrekar presented a session on the Anatomy of the Cisco FSO solution alongside Cisco Director of Sales Engineering Subarno Mukherjee.
In a key conversation, Raju Penmetsa, Chief Technology Officer at CloudFabrix and Ronak Desai, Senior VP and General Manager at AppDynamics and FSO at Cisco, spoke about the monitoring tool sprawl that induces friction in root cause analysis for Ops teams and hinders the user experience.
Mr. Desai pointed out how customers demanded a unified, open and extensible observability platform. Mr. Raju P emphasized that 90% of customers run hybrid workloads today and that CloudFabrix brings hybrid app data into FSO, composes, contextualizes and enriches it and utilizes dynamic baselining to help applications benefit from the underlying capabilities of the platform.
Simplicity continues to be a big theme for Cisco, and CloudFabrix helps materialize a part of it for Cisco customers. Simplicity is music to enterprises, and they trust Cisco and its partner ecosystem to deliver on it.
CloudFabrix Announces Macaw – Generative AI Assistant for Observability and AIOps
CloudFabrix announced the availability of Macaw, the Generative AI assistant for Telcos, MSPs and Enterprises. Macaw uses natural language conversational queries and identifies the context of prompts using Low-code Robotic Data Automation Fabric (RDAF).
Then, it uses Azure’s OpenAI Large Language Model (LLM) service and CloudFabrix LLM to perform a semantic search on the local knowledge corpus to derive insights and investigate data, compose and explain pipelines and dashboards and service tickets.
Macaw ensures data privacy and governance over local data, breaks down operational silos and democratizes observability and AIOps.
Bhaskar Krishnamsetty, Chief Product Officer at CloudFabrix, explained Macaw at Cisco Live. “RDAF is a low-code analytics platform that simplifies and automates end-to-end data pipelines for AIOps use cases and scenarios. Macaw, the GenAI assistant, takes it from low-code to no-code to allow developers, DevOps and DevSecOps to use conversational queries to build data pipelines and dashboards.”
Ron Williams, Principal Analyst at Gigaom, said, “CloudFabrix has demonstrated outperforming leadership in our 2023 Gigaom Radar report. Their Generative AI Assistant is an innovative implementation using OpenAI’s Large Language Model, but also a local LLM, which generates the context for Azure OpenAI Service. The assistant furthers their vision around Low Code/No Code pipelines for services like Observability Data Modernization, Composable Dashboards, and Edge services. We will be watching the development as it matures.”
What is Cisco FSO?
Cisco announced the Full Stack Observability platform focused on OpenTelemetry that consolidates networking, infrastructure and application observability through MELTs (metrics, events, logs and traces) like no other. The announcement materializes Cisco’s intention to move away from point products toward a platform approach.
Raju Datla, CEO, CloudFabrix, says, “This development further underlines the flexibility and adaptability of CloudFabrix RDAF.”
Cisco FSO is important in this digital age as IT teams must tirelessly ensure hindrances at the application or network level don’t lead to security and performance issues as developers strive to build secure solutions. Observability bridges the gap between these two functions, ultimately improving the user experience.
According to Gene Hall, VP of marketing and communications, strategy, incubation and applications at Cisco, the new platform ingests data from networking, infrastructure, applications, sustainability, security, cloud and other sources.
It then drives real-time contextual, correlated and predictive insights for Ops teams and app developers to diagnose root causes proactively. Cisco announced partnerships with CloudFabrix, Evolutio and Kanari to develop and monetize diverse solutions over the FSO platform to address new use cases.
Liz Centoni said, “Full-stack observability is critical in today’s digital-first business environment. Cisco FSO brings together network intelligence, security insights and application observability across the multi-cloud environment and the full technology stack to enable enterprises to deliver unmatched digital experiences with deep business context.”
The platform is extensible so that developers can build custom observability solutions on top of it.
CloudFabrix in the Prominence at Cisco Live
CloudFabrix’s vSphere Observability and Data Modernization service allows users to observe vSphere data through the FSO platform, correlate it with Kubernetes and infrastructure data and generate insights and recommend actions across infrastructure and containerized application stack.
Cisco’s agenda with digital transformation and app modernization complements CloudFabrix’s mantra of optimizing multi-cloud deployments with data-centric AIOps. CloudFabrix’s data-centric AIOps platform offers persona-based, unified and composable analytics services for Cisco FSO.
Full stack observability is a requirement for the modern enterprise to keep a tab across the hybrid, multi-cloud landscape.
