Cisco steps up full-stack observability play with Splunk tie-ins

Splunk brings depth and detail all the way down through the network to really understand what’s happening, added Tom Casey, senior vice president, products and technology, for Splunk. “And what I’m particularly excited about is our ability to bring and enrich our environment with all of that Cisco network data and thousands of data points, to give customers a fundamentally different perspective on what’s really up and running and why.”

Effectively integrating the observability capabilities of the two vendors will ultimately determine the success or failure of the acquisition, experts said.

“There is a ton of accessible enterprise data, analytics and telemetrics available to Cisco and Splunk, and what will be key for them is to integrate everything effectively – because customers don’t need a package full of different products that they need to figure out how to incorporate and use somehow,” said Neal Anderson, vice president of cloud, infrastructure and AI with technology services provider World Wide Technology.

Integration work has already begun. For example, one new development will let customers integrate logs from Splunk Platform with Cisco AppDynamics and Splunk Observability Cloud for faster troubleshooting across on-prem and hybrid environments, Casey stated.

“This integration lets SaaS and on-prem customers centralize logs and analyze them in context. With this integration, ITOps and engineering teams will be able to view multiple telemetry types for their traditional environments in a single interface, to perform in-context troubleshooting for three-tier and microservices-based applications,” Casey stated.

Another new feature will integrate application performance and business transaction metrics as well as alerts from Cisco AppDynamics with Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) to reduce alert noise and correlate IT health with business KPIs. “By integrating Cisco AIOps with Splunk IT Service Intelligence, alerts and events from Cisco networking devices and infrastructure can be correlated alongside the broader IT estate, for more accurate in-context troubleshooting inclusive of network signals,” Casey stated.