In our digitally connected culture, apps have become the lifeblood for businesses of every size and industry. By 2023, mobile apps are projected to generate more than$935 billion U.S. dollars in revenue from online gaming, in-app purchases, and advertising spend.¹Not only do apps provide medical and social connections and allow us to purchase virtually anything, anytime and anywhere, but they also bridge hybrid work environments-allowing for a more collaborative and agile workforce.

Having a reliable, high-quality app is no longer a nice-to-have. With the user experience becoming intrinsically tied to a company's brand, it's a must. But with potential outages costing organizations millions annually, how do you ensure the availability of your applications and uptime end to end? This is a concern on many CIO and IT decision makers' minds, as 89 percent state that consistent application performance across both application and infrastructure is key to driving a great user experience.²And with such high-profile concern, there's no room for bumps along the way.

Application performance roadblocks

Some of the key challenges in ensuring a superior user experience and improving app performance include:

• A lot of moving parts.DevOps, NetOps, SecOps, and everyone in between has a hand in bring a successful application release to market and ensuring that the app and the business stays up and running.
• Infrastructure complexity.Hybrid cloud environments, remote workforces, and migrations to SD-WAN make for a complex and disparate infrastructure to monitor, maintain, and optimize.
• Widening IT skills gap.While in-house technical talent was already a concern for many IT decision makers, the pandemic has widened this gap to a veritable canyon.

Couple this dynamic and multi-faceted infrastructure with the lack of skilled professionals to keep applications up and running, and it's a recipe for potential time and revenue loss. Organizations need tools that provide an end-to-end view into the performance and health of their applications and how their customers are interacting with them.

Full-stack observability

When you can't fix what you can't see, enterprises need the visibility and intelligence to turn data into insights and translate them into actions. Full-stack observability (FSO) provides insights into each touchpoint that connects an application to its user. From the internet, network, and cloud to the application, there are many dependencies along an app's journey. Businesses need to leverage deep analytics to predict and remediate issues before they become business-critical, at every touchpoint.

I recently sat down with Dave Zacks, a Distinguished Engineer in Cisco Customer Experience (CX), who has 36 years of networking industry experience-and for 22 years with Cisco, he has worked to drive improved availability and application performance. In this brief interview, Dave delves into the need to provide an amazing user experience, expands deeper into roadblocks, and shares practical guidance and best practices in achieving FSO.

Inside Track Video: Keys to Delivering a Mission-Critical Digital Experience

The first step in maximizing user experience

Gain expert guidance with full-stack observability tools to help you confidently and continuously transform and optimize the application experience for your customers and employees. Learn more about full-stack observability and start avoiding costly application downtime today.

¹Statista, 2021

²Cisco, 2021