Not all data is inherently suitable for full-stack observability platforms, the FSO platform Cisco recently debuted. CloudFabrix wants to solve that problem through its Observability Data Modernization Service (ODMS).
Cisco announced a tech preview of its own Full-Stack Observability (FSO) platform last February at Cisco Live in Amsterdam. It also immediately mentioned that FSO would be generally available by June of this year. As Cisco Live takes place in Las Vegas this week (we are on site, by the way), it is almost certain that Cisco will announce that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. With the arrival of such a platform, there will always be other players in the market offering specific solutions to enhance the platform even further. With CloudFabrix’s strong relationship with Cisco in mind, it’s no surprise that this design partner of Cisco is one of the first.
TIP: Earlier this year, we detailed what CloudFabrix wants to achieve with the Robotic Data Automation Fabric (RDAF) it has built. Be sure to read that article as well, because ODMS (see below) is built on RDAF.
Many different types of telemetry
One of the problems out there has to do with the standards that different parts of an IT environment use for telemetry. An FSO platform sounds interesting, but if it cannot ingest all the data, say from VMware vSphere, then it cannot live up to the name. That is, there is then not full-stack observability, but partial-stack observability. That would make it a lot less appealing for sure.
OpenTelemetry (OTEL) should play an important role in (among other things) the move towards actual full-stack observability. This open standard for telemetry is on the rise. Last April at KubeCon, for example, it was talked about a lot. And the fact that ServiceNow acquired an OTEL player like LightStep also indicates that it is going places. Finally, Cisco itself announced support for OTEL within ThousandEyes last February at Cisco Live Europe.
CloudFabrix Observability Data Modernization Service (ODMS)
The point, however, remains that a lot of telemetry still come in the form of the OTEL standard. Many vendor-specific agents are still used to collect data/telemetry. That’s where ODMS from CloudFabrix comes in. It converts these signals to OTEL signals, and makes them accessible to the observability platform, in this case specifically Cisco FSO. However, it can be used for other environments as well. CloudFabrix itself talks about specific verticals such as healthcare, fintech and telco and also specifically SAP environments.
ODMS, according to CloudFabrix, is not just about modernizing data. It also does something in terms of providing context. Specifically, this involves mapping the topology, enriching data using metadata and building dependencies across domains, we read in CloudFabrix’s press release. It does this by deploying more than 1,000 of the low-code bots we know from the Robotic Data Automation Fabric we referenced above. This component CloudFabrix does seem to have specifically aligned with Cisco FSO.
As we noted earlier, CloudFabrix does traditionally focus heavily on Cisco’s portfolio. However, it wants to be and remain relevant outside the Cisco world as well. It is good to know that today’s announcement is an example of what can be built on top of RDAF (more specifically, RDAF Edge), CloudFabrix indicates. It itself cites SAP Observability again as an example, as well as Telco Service Assurance. These components are complementary to the offerings the company is developing for Cisco FSO.
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