appdynamics.com

BUSINESS IQ

Six Business iQ use casesthat drive application andbusiness performance
A modern approach connecting user experience andapplication performance to business results© 2023 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

appdynamics.com

What is Business iQ?
Business iQ is a business observability solution that bridges the gap
between business and IT, providing real-time visibility into application
performance, business processes and user experience.
By combining business context with application analytics andperformance, technology leaders get the data they need to effectively
improve brand reputation, protect their revenue and break down silos
between business and IT.

Why does Business iQ matter?
Metrics alone are not enough to create a lasting impact on customers.
Unfortunately, IT Ops leaders have traditionally struggled to connect with
their business counterparts and align with business goals due to outdated
tooling and cultural barriers. This inward-facing approach focuses ontactical IT monitoring goals disconnected from customer experience.
What sets BiQ apart is its innate focus on business observability. It treats
your business and application data equally – providing access topreconfigured and customizable dashboards that help track businesscritical metrics like revenue, conversion rates, availability, user experienceand drop-off rates. Combined with best-in-class dynamic baselining andend-to-end user and business journey mapping, BiQ enables end-users
to gain actionable insights, prioritize key improvements and resolve realtime issues—even when seasonal changes occur.

Win with Business iQ• Protect revenue and gain the ability to visualize revenue paths withcorrelated customer experience and application performance to pinpoint,prioritize and fix application issues that result in reduced revenue.
• Improve real-time decision-making by collecting and analyzing businessmetrics/KPIs like revenue, conversion rates, availability, user experience anddrop-off rates from your applications in real time.
• Break down the silos between business and IT through holistic, correlated
views of application and business performance.

© 2023 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Six use cases
to apply Business iQ
to your enterprise
01

Business Health
Understand and act on real-time strategic business insights to improvebusiness outcomes.

How it works
Business Health converges business data with application andinfrastructure data to give you visibility into business KPIs that diagnose
and fix problems in real time. Cisco AppDynamics continuously
monitors an application’s business health, alerting any potential sales,orders or conversions issues before they become critical.

How to apply it
Take a major event scenario, such as Black Friday or an important
product launch day — or simply any day you may need to wincustomers. If you are using Cisco AppDynamics for your APM solution,your DevOps team may notice alerts impacting your application’sperformance. Business owners would want to understand the effecton key business drivers, as well as revenue and customer experience
implications. Business Health extends these capabilities to the KPIs
that matter to your business.

Fig 1: Shows shows that, inthe last hour, “Total Sales” may
be declining since few loyal
customers are shopping today.
This offers real-time insight
into the KPIs that impact yourbusiness© 2023 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

302User JourneysUnderstand the performance metrics and business impact of a sequential
order of customer events.

How it works
User Journeys measure how business components and customer
experience come together to drive top-level KPIs. From banks looking
to optimize processes to retailers trying to visualize how customers shop
online, it enables you to visualize different parts of a process, driving acommon language between business and IT.

How to apply it
A bank’s loan processing experiences a percentage drop in conversion
and loan dollars processed. It’s coming from two areas: high credit check
response time and high loan approval error rate. The combined effect is red
health of total dollars processed.
• Business teams are interested to know how many customers are in the loan
journey, where drop-offs occur and how KPIs are impacted.
• Operations team members are curious to learn whether drop-offs are a resultof slow application performance.
• Developer teams want to know how issues impact a larger process and cause
real business impact.

In the above scenario, a longer response time during the “SubmitApplication” step at seven seconds is probably causing a higher dropoff, impacting the loan amount processed at $10M. Furthermore, a 15%
error rate at credit check is further compounding this problem at the loan
approval stage.

Fig 2: helps illustrate
this use case© 2023 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

4

03

Segment HealthAnalyze, monitor, control and prioritize segmented customer experiences
to improve SLA, service adoption and other performance KPIs.

How it works
The Segment Health capability gives you visibility into which customersare using what features and whether application performance isimpacting usage behaviors. DevOps can prioritize which segments totroubleshoot based on how application usage might be impacting yourbusiness, while providing the best possible user experience.

How to apply it
Imagine you’re in the business of connecting back-end inventory to frontend buying channels [think: travel inventory flights and hotels on bookingsites]. To compare your end-users’ experience across various buying
channels, Business iQ segments based on error codes, slow transactions,etc., to proactively monitor performance so you can avoid any end-user
issues. This empowers your DevOps team to prioritize troubleshooting,using “Confirm Reservation” for its customer “Priceline” and “Search
Availability” for the rest. This allows them to see how their critical customer
segments are performing and to prioritize what to work on.

Fig 3© 2023 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

504

Release Validation
Compare, interrogate and validate production code releases based on
applications, customer experiences and business KPIs.

How it works
Use Cisco AppDynamics in real time as you release newer versionsof your application, migrate from legacy infrastructure to new
infrastructure or compare pre-release and post-release performance.

How to apply it
Customers sign up for subscriptions on an APDY media entertainment
site. They create a profile, select their favorite content, set alerts on what
content they want to be alerted and confirm their subscriptions. In thisdashboard, the subscription rate starts to decline significantly in Version
1.0 of APDY media, apparently due to a performance issue as people
select their “Favorite Content.” Business iQ helps you fix that problem,
while simultaneously comparing whether your new release version fix
actually worked. The new code you push out may make improvementsin the “Favorite Content” step along the journey, which results in theconversion rate climbing back up again. Interestingly, although you are
sending a smaller amount of traffic to Version 2, you can still manage totriple your conversion rate, while also driving much higher subscriptions.

Fig 4© 2023 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

6

05

Business Journeys
Analyze and measure how application performance impacts complexbusiness processes that span multiple business events.

How it works
Business Journeys enable application teams to author, join, analyze andmonitor multiple distributed business events as a single process.
By holistically analyzing an entire business process, application teams
can identify patterns and discover performance latency, risk andopportunity for an entire line of business. Application teams can track
business process KPIs to validate investments and effectively prioritize
the code that they write and the features they release. Business
Journeys give modern businesses a new way to build and run missioncritical and strategic services.

How to apply it
Consider this example of a loan application approval process that spansdifferent event types, services, and applications. Application teams need away to identify performance latency within the entire business process —for both individual applications and operational gaps. Business iQ enables
these multiple milestones to link together as a business journey. In such aworkflow, “Application Submission” information could come from business
transaction events, whereas “Document Verification” status could comefrom logs. “Credit Approval” and “Underwriting” are performed by thirdparty service providers, and the status could be updated in logs as well.
“Final Approval” status could then be updated in transaction events.
This example is a simplistic, representation of a typical loan application
process. Even then, there is tremendous complexity in monitoring these
individual milestones and performing analytics on the aggregated business
workflow. There are many examples from other industries (such asinsurance claims, cell phone activation, payment transfers, etc.) in which thebusiness journeys could last for hours or sometimes days.

Fig 5© 2023 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

7

06

Experience Level Management
Experience Level Management provides management and reportingon the performance of critical business segments and targets forapplication performance.

How it works
The ability to define, measure, and report on the performance ofexperience levels in applications. An experience level can be a defined
SLA (IE: transactions must complete within two seconds for a specificpartner), or an aspirational target to improve business outcomes (IE:loyalty customers should experience no more than 1 second responsetime for checkout transactions). Creating and segmenting experiencelevels for analytics data sets in Cisco AppDynamics helps you understandwhat your service level is for critical business segments and ensures
adherence to contractual SLAs. This enables you to reduce the amountof fines & penalties due to inability to track, measure and resolve issues
that may impact experience levels that have been set. This results in an
immutable audit trail that establishes trust between you and your clients.

How to apply it
Take an airline booking company for example. Its business relies onpulling data and availability from multiple different airlines and serving
that information up in a timely fashion to the customer. Each airline thatpartners with the booking company has an SLA to meet to ensure theircustomers are receiving the company’s standard of service and ensure theuser experience is flawless.

ME N T

ement and reporting onnd targets for application

performance of experience

The airline booking company needs to continuously monitor these metrics(response time per partner), and their business outcomes (successfulbookings). XLM provides dashboard automation that reduces manual laborspent on pulling reports to continuously monitor historical performance.
Businesses can then ensure that they, or external partners, are meetingthese performance targets or contractual SLAs.

e a defined SLA (IE: transactions

artner), or an aspirational target tors should experience no moreactions). Creating and segmenting

Dynamics helps you understandgments, and ensures adherence

the amount of fines & penalties

ues that may impact experience

utable audit trail that establishess business relies on pulling Fig 6

nes, and serving that information

Figure 6

ne that partners with the booking

2023 Ciscothe
and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
tomers are ©
receiving

8

ser experience is flawless.

MKT 1203 2023