Cisco Live 2024: New Unified Observability Experience Combines Cisco & Splunk Tools

Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk is playing out with a new full-stack observability product, the Unified Observability Experience, Cisco announced at the Cisco Live conference on June 5. As part of the same suite of conference announcements, Cisco also showed off the initial availability of a free trial version of Motific, a generative AI delivery platform made in concert with Mistral AI.

Unified Observability Experience creates easy connections between AppDynamics and Splunk Platform

Cisco acquired data observability and security company Splunk in March 2024. At that time, Splunk Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins, as well as Splunk Executive Vice President and General Manager Gary Steele, wrote in a press release that the company planned to “drive new innovations with a unified data platform.” The Unified Observability Experience announced June 5 follows up on this by creating a full-stack observability offering from both companies’ products. Unified Observability Experience offers:

• New single sign-on credentials for shared workflows between Cisco AppDynamics and Splunk.
• Context-aware deep linking with which Cisco AppDynamics customers can easily transition to relevant logs in the Splunk Platform.
• Full-stack, environment-agnostic connections between a variety of applications, including Cisco AppDynamics on Microsoft Azure.
• Other new connections between Cisco and Splunk Platform.

The Unified Observability Experience will be generally available in the third quarter of 2024, wherever Cisco SaaS products are sold.

SEE: In May 2024, Cisco and Splunk began their convergence with new security capabilities for Cisco Hypershield.

Cisco AppDynamics gains AI tools and a Microsoft Azure option

Cisco and Splunk announced new AI tools to assist with decision-making:

• An AI assistant for Cisco AppDynamics, generally available in Q3 2024.
• Tools for configuring thresholds, managing and optimizing configurations and insights with AI and machine learning in Splunk IT Service Intelligence, generally available now.

Cisco AppDynamics will be hosted as software-as-a-service on Microsoft Azure starting in the third quarter of this year, enabling compliance with industry-specific regulatory requirements across new regions. For now, Cisco said, AppDynamics will be expanded to Canada.

Cisco’s incubator Outshift teams up with Mistral AI

Cisco’s incubation arm, Outshift, announced its generative AI deployment tool Motific is now available as a free trial in advance of the general availability of the production version by July 31. Motific helps IT and business function teams to provision generative AI assistants and applications. This is a hot industry, with companies selling easier ways for businesses to adopt equally trendy generative AI solutions.

In addition, Outshift has shaken hands with Mistral AI to offer Mistral AI’s large language model as a preset model in Motific.

“We are pleased to launch this collaboration with Cisco, which will bring new opportunities for GenAI assistants through Motific,” said Mistral AI CEO and co-founder Arthur Mensch in a press release. “We are looking forward to see(ing) our models enhancing innovation and optimizing operations for Cisco’s clients, all while ensuring compliance with their organization’s trust, security, and cost policies.”

Going forward, Cisco and Outshift plan to use Mistral AI products for upcoming guardrails, intelligence and retrieval-augmented generation capabilities in Motific. Outshift will explore using Mistral AI to build domain and task-specific models in Outshift’s products and features.

Mistral AI is among the recipients of Cisco’s recently announced $1 billion AI global investment fund.