Going 'Under the Hood' to get a closer look at the Intersight Workload Optimizer Decision Engine -Blog 2 of 3 in a weekly series where we dig a little deeper into the technology behind the Workload Optimizer service of Intersight.

Going Under the Hood with AppD and IWO

As noted in my previous blog, How Targets Work, the core focus of Intersight Workload Optimizer (IWO) is to ensure that workloads get the resources they need, when they need them, whilesimultaneouslyoptimizing for cost and utilization -what we call Application Resource Management (ARM). However, for an application to truly perform well, it needs more than just the right physical resources at the right time; it also needs to be written and architected well, and that's where Cisco AppDynamics (AppD) comes into play. AppDynamics provides critical ApplicationPerformanceMonitoring: the ability to discover and diagnose performance issues in the software stack and correlate them directly to business outcomes. Individually, AppDynamics and Intersight Workload Optimizer are industry-leading in their respective areas of APM and ARM; when directly integrated they provide an unbeatable combination to ensure the success of business-critical applications.

But how does this integration actually work?

Adding the AppDynamics Target

First, let's see just how easy it is to add AppDynamics as a target for IWO. After logging into Intersight, we follow the general process discussed in the previous blog for adding a new target by launching the wizard atAdmin