Case Study: Cisco reduces false positives and improves cloud performance with AppDynamics

Cisco improves application visibility and business outcomes with AppDynamics

Cisco Security Cloud Operations (part of Cisco Systems’ Security Business Group) protects users worldwide—blocking over 259 million threats per day—across 23 data centers with 2,000 physical servers, 5,000 VMs and more than 200 applications. The team faced exploding scale and noise: annual monitoring produced 88,000 alerts (about 96% false positives) while users and daily transactions grew rapidly, making continual compute upscaling unsustainable and slowing incident response.

After a May 2013 proof-of-concept, Cisco deployed AppDynamics globally—15,000 agents reporting to a single SaaS controller in one week—giving end-to-end application visibility. The result: dramatic reduction in false positives and roughly 7,000 man-hours saved annually, faster root-cause identification (e.g., fixing a misconfiguration that sent 17 million unnecessary requests in five minutes), a 4–5% improvement in memory utilization, and better cross-team collaboration that helped move the organization toward DevOps and automated remediation.

Cisco

Nitin Thakur

Technical Operations Manager