Cisco is adding Kubernetes governance and cost management to its AppDynamics business observability platform with its intent to acquire Replex. The networking giant announced an agreement buy the privately held, Germany-based company, late Monday. It didn’t say how much it’s paying for Replex.

Acquiring Replex is Cisco’s latest effort to enhance AppDynamics, the application performance monitoring company it acquired in 2017 for $3.7 billion. The deal is Cisco’s latest move in its increased focus to broaden the capabilities of the AppDynamics business observability platform.

Earlier this year, Cisco bought Dashbase, bringing that company’s log tracing and events analytics technology to AppDynamics. Cisco last year also acquired ThousandEyes, whose network intelligence technology was recently integrated into the AppDynamics Dash Studio data visualization tool.

Now that modern cloud applications are increasingly container-based Kubernetes clusters, replex is poised to enhance AppDynamics’ capability to observe those solutions. In the blog announcing the deal, AppDynamics GM Linda Tong noted that Replex addresses the need to observe cloud-native environments.

“Replex’s deep expertise in Kubernetes, real-time data extraction and analytics will further strengthen AppDynamics’ world-class product and engineering team as we accelerate the delivery of Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability vision,” Tong explained.

Tong underscored the need for organizations to have visibility to their entire application environments. Pointing to Cisco’s Agents of Transformation 2021 report, Tong said virtually all IT experts, 96% of those surveyed, indicated that they need visibility to the entire technology stack.

“They need accurate, real-time data,” she emphasized.

What Replex Brings to AppDynamics

Founded in 2016, Replex’s core offering is its Kubernetes governance and cost management platform. It correlates historical and real-time data usage from various sources. The replex APIs integrate with the three major clouds — AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The API also connects with sources based on the popular Prometheus open-source standard for orchestrating and monitoring Kubernetes container clusters.

The Replex API is open to systems integrators, ISVs and managed service providers. The interface is available as a RESTful API with documentation for developers. A terminal-based command line interface (CLI) tool ingests data for DevOps engineers.

Courtesy: Replex

The platform includes Replex Metic Hub and Optimization Engine, designed to automate and optimize Kubernetes cluster performance. Replex also has tools that provide policy controls that organizations can develop and use to govern to meet compliance requirements. Moreover, it includes management tools that provide cost allocation and chargebacks.

According to Replex, its proprietary machine algorithms can ingest historical and real-time data usage to recommend how to optimize Kubernetes environments. It also provides an ROI optimization tool to compare actual costs with budgets.

Competitive Environment: New Relic I/O Launch

When Cisco acquired AppDynamics nearly five years ago, it picked up the fastest growing provider in the expanding APM market. Cisco has since maintained AppDynamics as a standalone subsidiary. Nevertheless, AppDynamics has faced intense competition from rivals including Datadog, Dynatrace and New Relic.

Like Cisco and AppDynamics, its rivals have also focused on observability. While the Replex open API interfaces with Prometheus-compatible Kubernetes application infrastructure, New Relic this month launched its own open-source effort. New Relic Instant Observability, which the company calls New Relic I/O, is what the company calls an open-source ecosystem of “quickstarts.”

New Relic I/O includes more than 400 cloud services, open-source tools and custom solutions. Among the first partners disclosed by New Relic are Cribl, Fastly, Gigamon, Kentik, Lacework and Trend Micro.

“Within New Relic Instant Observability, current New Relic One users can extend the platform with publicly available apps or any custom apps your team builds,” according to a post by product marketing Louis Leung. “You can choose from hundreds of quickstarts (including LAMP, Gatsby, and Kafka) that bundle the necessary building blocks for instrumenting, monitoring and acting on signals from your technology stack — and install them in a click.”

Leung added that New Relic has built quickstarts that integrate with “hundreds” of popular cloud services, tools and open-source standards.

These new moves by Cisco and New Relic promise to give systems integrators and MSPs a broader approach to bringing modern, cloud-native environments into the mix of monitoring and securing organizations entire application stacks with a unified approach.