Cisco ACI and AppDynamics integration
Digital transformation is a complex team effort across business and IT, requiring end-to-end application management and awareness. AppDynamics provides IT teams the application-layer visibility and monitoring required in an intent-based architecture to validate that IT and business policies are being implemented across the network. Cisco ACI and AppDynamics integration provides dynamic correlation between application and network constructs. This combined solution provides high-quality application performance monitoring, richer diagnostic capability for application and network performance, and faster root-cause analysis of problems, with fast triage, sent quickly to appropriate team members. For example, does a given problem pertain to an application or to the network?
Figure 9-18 illustrates Cisco ACI and AppDynamics integration.
Figure 9-18 Cisco ACI and AppDynamics Integration
This integration does the following:
- Dynamically maps the application and service components to the Cisco ACI network elements, thus providing a shared view of the application and infrastructure across teams
- Provides a dynamic view of application use in the infrastructure for the network operations team
- Provides a cross-launch for application teams to correlate network and application fault and performance data
- Baselines application health status in AppDynamics by correlating the Cisco ACI network health and faults
With this integration, you can correlate application service-level management with infrastructure monitoring. This new integration significantly reduces the time it takes to identify and troubleshoot end-to-end application performance issues.
Cisco ACI and Cisco SD-Access Integration
Hyper-distributed applications and highly mobile users, increased cybersecurity threats, and increased regulatory requirements make network segmentation a must for reducing risk and achieving better compliance. Policy integration between Cisco ACI and Cisco SD-Access allows the marrying of Cisco ACI’s application-based microsegmentation in the data center with Cisco SD-Access’s user-group-based segmentation across the campus and branch. This integration automates the mapping and enforcement of segmentation policy based on the user’s security profile as they access resources within the data center. It enables security administrators to manage segmentation seamlessly from end to end, user to application. A common and consistent identity-based microsegmentation capability is provided from the user to the application.
Figure 9-19 illustrates Cisco ACI and Cisco SD-Access integration.
Figure 9-19 Cisco ACI and Cisco SD-Access Integration
As a result of this integration, the attack surface is greatly reduced, and any unauthorized or suspicious access to resources and potential threats can quickly be controlled and remediated.
Cisco ACI and Kubernetes Anywhere Integration
Cisco ACI is designed to offer policy-based automation, security, mobility, and visibility for application workloads regardless of whether they run on bare-metal servers, hypervisors, or Linux containers. The Cisco ACI system-level approach extends the support for Linux containers by providing tight integration of Kubernetes, a popular container orchestration platform, and the Cisco ACI platform.
This integration allows Cisco ACI to provide a ready-to-use, secure networking environment for Kubernetes. The integration maintains the simplicity of the user experience in deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications while still offering the controls, visibility, security, and isolation required by an enterprise.
The Cisco ACI and Kubernetes solution offers the following benefits:
- Flexible approach to policy
- Automated, integrated load-balancing services
- Secure multitenancy
- Visibility and telemetry information
Figure 9-20 illustrates Cisco ACI integration with Kubernetes anywhere.
Figure 9-20 Kubernetes Anywhere Integrated with Cisco ACI